Markus Holdo
Biographic Data
| ID | 376365 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Markus Holdo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Markus |
| FAMILY NAME | Holdo |
| SIGNATURE | HOLDO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Uppsala University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5921-0983 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 161 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The affective paradox in populist online communities: Emotional capital and emotional liability
Various studies demonstrate that emotions may both facilitate and complicate political mobilization. We study the role of emotions for supporters of populist, largely far-right, online movements. Using life history interviews, we show how 20 Twitter users in the United States and Sweden navigate emotion. Highlighting their ideal of rationality, they often see emotions as a liability, yet large parts of their mobilization are motivated by emotiona…
Different farmers, different views: Understanding policy feedback and symbolic stratification in Italy and Sweden
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has become one of the EUs most contested policy areas. But despite widely observed patterns of rural resentment and farmers’ resistance to environmental policies, few studies have examined the CAPs political consequences beyond recent farmers protests. Drawing on policy feedback theory, Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic fields, and scholarship on sociotechnical imaginaries, this paper offers an interpretive policy…
Caring for Democracy: Feminist Ethics and Radical Democratic Spaces
Radical theories of democracy challenge us to consider the significance of various social conditions and practices that affect people’s possibilities to engage with social injustices. However, they still tend to obscure how political spaces are possible in the first place. How are, for instance, spaces of deliberation or agonistic contestation created and sustained over time? How do people enter them and become recognized as participants? Buildin…
Self-care as resistance: Lorde, Foucault, and playfulness
Self-care has emerged as a critical practice of resistance in the current era of far-right resurgence. Building particularly on Audre Lorde’s insights, scholars, activists, and cultural workers conceptualize self-care as an act of political defiance and a strategy of collective survival. This article brings three different views of self-care into conversation. Beginning with Lorde's vision and contrasting it with Michel Foucault's ethics of the s…
Patriarchal securitization: Epistemic domination in the politics of European agriculture
This article examines how the securitization of food production in the European Union (EU) reinforces patriarchal authority and epistemic exclusion. Building on feminist security studies, it analyzes how discourses of ‘food security’ elevate masculinized figures of authority–farmers cast as protectors and providers–while marginalizing alternative knowledges of care, sustainability, and glob al justice. The study applies frame analysis to debates …
Democracy Care in the Neoliberal City: The Ambivalent Ethics of Caring in an Uncaring World
Suppose an act of caring can be at once good, even admirable, and still help sustain a system that harms people and our shared world. In this paper, I reflect on interviews with street-level bureaucrats working with civil society to maintain and repair collective capacities for problem-solving and collective reflection in segregated Swedish cities. I want to explore how seeing their work as a form of care – as caring for democracy – may help addr…
To walk the walk: Why we need to make things personal in public deliberation
Uncomfortable interviews: A research journey of discomfort and how to make the most of it
How does discomfort affect research interviewing? Recent contributions suggest that researchers do not always experience discomfort as problematic but also as productive. We explore our experiences of, and strategies for, uncomfortable interviews. Based on experiences of interviewing right-wing populist Twitter activists in the United States and Sweden, we make four claims. First, discomfort may arise throughout the research process with multiple…
Reflective Inclusion: Learning from Activists What Taking a Deliberative Stance Means
Researchers are increasingly recognizing that social movements are crucial for realizing deliberative democratic values. However, this raises two important questions: (1) what actions should count as deliberation and (2) whether we should demand more from activists than merely provoking or encouraging deliberation in a society. Building on current research on activists’ actual engagement with deliberation, we argue that the standard of taking a “…
How can we trust a political leader? Ethics, institutions, and relational theory
That citizens can trust leaders in politics and the public sphere to be sincere and truthful helps to make democracy work. However, the idea of authentic communication raises both sociological and ethical questions. Scholars focusing on institutional conditions emphasize that audiences only have reasons to trust speakers that appear to have incentives to be truthful, unless they know them personally. However, theorists of ethics argue that authen…
An inclusive and participatory approach to counter-radicalization? Examining the role of Muslim associations in the Swedish policy process
Policies on preventing radicalization and recruitment to violent Islamist organizations have been widely criticized for reinforcing negative stereotypes of Muslims as a group. Sweden has stood out by international comparison by announcing an approach built on inclusion and participation, especially with regard to Muslim civil society. But what does it mean to make a policy process inclusive and participatory? How can values of inclusion and parti…
Rural Arguments: Four perspectives in Swedish Political Debate
Meta-deliberation: Everyday Acts of Critical Reflection in Deliberative Systems
The term ‘meta-deliberation’ refers to processes of addressing problems with the way that conversations about shared concerns – our ordinary deliberations – proceed. This article discusses the distinction between meta-deliberation and ordinary deliberation and examines three questions raised by previous arguments about meta-deliberation: (1) what kinds of communication should count as meta-deliberation, (2) does meta-deliberation always lead to r…
Violations of basic deliberative norms: The systemic turn and problems of inclusion
What is the appropriate way to respond to actions that break basic norms of respectfulness, sincerity, and public-mindedness? At the same time as this question has become a central concern for democratic societies, a ‘systemic’ turn has unsettled established solutions for democratic theorists. From the systemic perspective, it is more important how actions contribute to public discourse than whether they meet standards of deliberation individuall…
Power Games: Elites, Movements, and Strategic Cooperation
Cooperation between movements and political elites are frequently associated with the risk of cooptation. Because it undercuts contentious actors, cooptation may seem rational for elites that seek to protect their interests. However, recent scholarship questions whether this view is empirically valid. Adding to these debates, this article demonstrates that even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that elites always act to maintain power, coop…
Why Inequalities Persist in Public Deliberation: Five Mechanisms of Marginalization
Previous research has suggested that reflective “meta-deliberation,” or discussions about how discussions proceed, can help to address patterns of marginalization. This article suggests, however, that moving to a meta level is not in itself a solution, since it may easily bring along such patterns. Inequalities persist through specific mechanisms that may be present in both ordinary deliberation and meta-deliberation. We explore such mechanisms e…
Contestation in Participatory Budgeting: Spaces, Boundaries, and Agency
Local political leaders as well as international organizations have embraced participatory budgeting in response to problems of political exclusion and citizens' dissatisfaction with representative democracy. This article provides a framework to highlight important aspects of the politics of participation. The framework allows scholars to explore how factors external to spaces of participation interact with aspects of participation within them. T…
Power and Citizen Deliberation: The Contingent Impacts of Interests, Ideology, and Status Differences
Both advocates and critics of deliberative theory have regarded power relations as problems for public deliberation. Three aspects—interests, ideology and status differences—have been thought to distort deliberative processes. This article discusses a growing body of case studies that indicate that these “problems” may actually, under certain conditions, help facilitate inclusion and equality in deliberation. The crucial task is to specify the me…
Marginalization and Riots: A Rationalistic Explanation of Urban Unrest
Urban riots are typically carried out by individuals who live in residential areas that are relatively marginalized socially, economically and politically. Previous research has discussed several aspects of deprivation that may help explain this relationship. Contributing further to this research, we aim to explain why marginalization produces riots by developing a rationalistic specification of social mechanisms. The utility of our model is demo…
Cooptation and non-cooptation: Elite Strategies in Response to Social Protest
The risk of cooptation – of being absorbed by powerful elites without gaining new advantages – is an important concern in studies of social movements and social change. Through cooptation, elites undermine movements by stripping them of their credibility as agents of change. This paper aims to explain why, despite its powerful rationale, cooptation does not occur more frequently. Building on political process theory and relational sociology, it d…
Do citizens use storytelling or rational argumentation to lobby politicians
What should count as legitimate forms of reasoning in public deliberation is a contested issue. Democratic theorists have argued that storytelling may offer a more accessible form of deliberation for marginalised citizens than ‘rational argumentation’. We investigate the empirical support for this claim by examining Swedish citizens’ use of storytelling in written communication with the political establishment. We test whether stories are used fr…
Sincerity as Strategy: Green Movements and the Problem of Reconciling Deliberative and Instrumental Action
Social movements seek to influence views on environmental issues and put pressure on policy-makers in a range of related areas. But alongside their specific goals, they also often strive to create space for genuine deliberation about the need for societal transformation. This ‘dual orientation’ places them theoretically between social movement studies’ focus on strategic considerations and the ‘sincere’ (truthful) communication envisioned by demo…
A relational perspective on deliberative systems: Combining interpretive and structural analysis
Deliberative systems theory suggests that a democratic society works well when citizens’ experiences and views, as expressed in various forms and sites of communication, are connected and taken up by other citizens as well as policy-makers. Pluralism, which is not always easily reconciled with high-quality deliberation in every instance, is seen as instrumental to the realization of democratic values and sound decision-making. This perspective ra…
The Virtuous, the Critical and the Trustworthy: Citizen Ideals and Forms of Democratic Participation
A vibrant democratic society requires continuous innovation to actualize and encourage democratic ideals through participation, but no universal answers exist as to which kinds of participation are best suited to achieve this. This article demonstrates that different types of participation correlate with different citizen ideals, implying that the remedies to democratic deficits depend on which ideals need to be strengthened. Citizen survey data …
Post-Islamism and fields of contention after the Arab Spring: Feminism, Salafism and the revolutionary youth
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, conflicts in Egypt and Tunisia over the authority to rule and the role of religion in society raised questions about these societies’ capacity for reconciling differences. In retrospect, the conflicts also raise questions about the theoretical tools used to analyse regional developments. In particular, the ‘post-Islamism’ thesis has significantly changed the debates on ‘Islam and democracy’ by bringing to ligh…
Cooptation and non-cooptation: Elite Strategies in Response to Social Protest
The risk of cooptation – of being absorbed by powerful elites without gaining new advantages – is an important concern in studies of social movements and social change. Through cooptation, elites undermine movements by stripping them of their credibility as agents of change. This paper aims to explain why, despite its powerful rationale, cooptation does not occur more frequently. Building on political process theory and relational sociology, it d…
Strategies of Deliberation: Bourdieu and Struggles over Legitimate Positions
Bourdieusian contributions to the discourse on deliberative democracy have recently proved issues of ‘deliberative inequality’ to be more complicated than previously imagined. Some have come to question the desirability or sufficiency of deliberative forms of politics. Others, like James Bohman, have found Bourdieu's theorizing lacking the conception of people's reflexive capacities required to understand social and political change. Critics and …
Meta-deliberation: Everyday Acts of Critical Reflection in Deliberative Systems
The term ‘meta-deliberation’ refers to processes of addressing problems with the way that conversations about shared concerns – our ordinary deliberations – proceed. This article discusses the distinction between meta-deliberation and ordinary deliberation and examines three questions raised by previous arguments about meta-deliberation: (1) what kinds of communication should count as meta-deliberation, (2) does meta-deliberation always lead to r…
Deliberative capital: Recognition in participatory budgeting
This article suggests (1) that deliberative democrats seeking to understand the conditions of inclusion in the public sphere should reconsider whether deliberative ‘skills,’ ‘competence,’ and ‘capacity’ are adequate to capture what effective participation requires, (2) that they would understand this differently, and better, by thinking in terms of deliberative capital, a concept more sensitive to how norms condition recognition of legitimate spe…
A relational perspective on deliberative systems: Combining interpretive and structural analysis
Deliberative systems theory suggests that a democratic society works well when citizens’ experiences and views, as expressed in various forms and sites of communication, are connected and taken up by other citizens as well as policy-makers. Pluralism, which is not always easily reconciled with high-quality deliberation in every instance, is seen as instrumental to the realization of democratic values and sound decision-making. This perspective ra…
Rural Arguments: Four perspectives in Swedish Political Debate
Sincerity as Strategy: Green Movements and the Problem of Reconciling Deliberative and Instrumental Action
Social movements seek to influence views on environmental issues and put pressure on policy-makers in a range of related areas. But alongside their specific goals, they also often strive to create space for genuine deliberation about the need for societal transformation. This ‘dual orientation’ places them theoretically between social movement studies’ focus on strategic considerations and the ‘sincere’ (truthful) communication envisioned by demo…
Reasons of Power: Explaining Non-cooptation in Participatory Budgeting
Research on the use of participatory budgeting (PB) in urban politics has, perhaps not surprisingly, found that PB participants are often coopted by the government. From a realist perspective, however, it is more surprising that cooptation does not always occur and the mechanisms of non-cooptation are still not well understood. Previous research has often explained successful outcomes in terms of the ideology of incumbents or the strength of soci…
Reflective Inclusion: Learning from Activists What Taking a Deliberative Stance Means
Researchers are increasingly recognizing that social movements are crucial for realizing deliberative democratic values. However, this raises two important questions: (1) what actions should count as deliberation and (2) whether we should demand more from activists than merely provoking or encouraging deliberation in a society. Building on current research on activists’ actual engagement with deliberation, we argue that the standard of taking a “…
Violations of basic deliberative norms: The systemic turn and problems of inclusion
What is the appropriate way to respond to actions that break basic norms of respectfulness, sincerity, and public-mindedness? At the same time as this question has become a central concern for democratic societies, a ‘systemic’ turn has unsettled established solutions for democratic theorists. From the systemic perspective, it is more important how actions contribute to public discourse than whether they meet standards of deliberation individuall…
Why Inequalities Persist in Public Deliberation: Five Mechanisms of Marginalization
Previous research has suggested that reflective “meta-deliberation,” or discussions about how discussions proceed, can help to address patterns of marginalization. This article suggests, however, that moving to a meta level is not in itself a solution, since it may easily bring along such patterns. Inequalities persist through specific mechanisms that may be present in both ordinary deliberation and meta-deliberation. We explore such mechanisms e…
Marginalization and Riots: A Rationalistic Explanation of Urban Unrest
Urban riots are typically carried out by individuals who live in residential areas that are relatively marginalized socially, economically and politically. Previous research has discussed several aspects of deprivation that may help explain this relationship. Contributing further to this research, we aim to explain why marginalization produces riots by developing a rationalistic specification of social mechanisms. The utility of our model is demo…
Contestation in Participatory Budgeting: Spaces, Boundaries, and Agency
Local political leaders as well as international organizations have embraced participatory budgeting in response to problems of political exclusion and citizens' dissatisfaction with representative democracy. This article provides a framework to highlight important aspects of the politics of participation. The framework allows scholars to explore how factors external to spaces of participation interact with aspects of participation within them. T…
Post-Islamism and fields of contention after the Arab Spring: Feminism, Salafism and the revolutionary youth
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, conflicts in Egypt and Tunisia over the authority to rule and the role of religion in society raised questions about these societies’ capacity for reconciling differences. In retrospect, the conflicts also raise questions about the theoretical tools used to analyse regional developments. In particular, the ‘post-Islamism’ thesis has significantly changed the debates on ‘Islam and democracy’ by bringing to ligh…
The Virtuous, the Critical and the Trustworthy: Citizen Ideals and Forms of Democratic Participation
A vibrant democratic society requires continuous innovation to actualize and encourage democratic ideals through participation, but no universal answers exist as to which kinds of participation are best suited to achieve this. This article demonstrates that different types of participation correlate with different citizen ideals, implying that the remedies to democratic deficits depend on which ideals need to be strengthened. Citizen survey data …
Power Games: Elites, Movements, and Strategic Cooperation
Cooperation between movements and political elites are frequently associated with the risk of cooptation. Because it undercuts contentious actors, cooptation may seem rational for elites that seek to protect their interests. However, recent scholarship questions whether this view is empirically valid. Adding to these debates, this article demonstrates that even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that elites always act to maintain power, coop…
Do citizens use storytelling or rational argumentation to lobby politicians
What should count as legitimate forms of reasoning in public deliberation is a contested issue. Democratic theorists have argued that storytelling may offer a more accessible form of deliberation for marginalised citizens than ‘rational argumentation’. We investigate the empirical support for this claim by examining Swedish citizens’ use of storytelling in written communication with the political establishment. We test whether stories are used fr…
Patriarchal securitization: Epistemic domination in the politics of European agriculture
This article examines how the securitization of food production in the European Union (EU) reinforces patriarchal authority and epistemic exclusion. Building on feminist security studies, it analyzes how discourses of ‘food security’ elevate masculinized figures of authority–farmers cast as protectors and providers–while marginalizing alternative knowledges of care, sustainability, and glob al justice. The study applies frame analysis to debates …
Democracy Care in the Neoliberal City: The Ambivalent Ethics of Caring in an Uncaring World
Suppose an act of caring can be at once good, even admirable, and still help sustain a system that harms people and our shared world. In this paper, I reflect on interviews with street-level bureaucrats working with civil society to maintain and repair collective capacities for problem-solving and collective reflection in segregated Swedish cities. I want to explore how seeing their work as a form of care – as caring for democracy – may help addr…
To walk the walk: Why we need to make things personal in public deliberation
How can we trust a political leader? Ethics, institutions, and relational theory
That citizens can trust leaders in politics and the public sphere to be sincere and truthful helps to make democracy work. However, the idea of authentic communication raises both sociological and ethical questions. Scholars focusing on institutional conditions emphasize that audiences only have reasons to trust speakers that appear to have incentives to be truthful, unless they know them personally. However, theorists of ethics argue that authen…
An inclusive and participatory approach to counter-radicalization? Examining the role of Muslim associations in the Swedish policy process
Policies on preventing radicalization and recruitment to violent Islamist organizations have been widely criticized for reinforcing negative stereotypes of Muslims as a group. Sweden has stood out by international comparison by announcing an approach built on inclusion and participation, especially with regard to Muslim civil society. But what does it mean to make a policy process inclusive and participatory? How can values of inclusion and parti…
Deliberative capital: Recognition in participatory budgeting
This article suggests (1) that deliberative democrats seeking to understand the conditions of inclusion in the public sphere should reconsider whether deliberative ‘skills,’ ‘competence,’ and ‘capacity’ are adequate to capture what effective participation requires, (2) that they would understand this differently, and better, by thinking in terms of deliberative capital, a concept more sensitive to how norms condition recognition of legitimate spe…
Strategies of Deliberation: Bourdieu and Struggles over Legitimate Positions
Bourdieusian contributions to the discourse on deliberative democracy have recently proved issues of ‘deliberative inequality’ to be more complicated than previously imagined. Some have come to question the desirability or sufficiency of deliberative forms of politics. Others, like James Bohman, have found Bourdieu's theorizing lacking the conception of people's reflexive capacities required to understand social and political change. Critics and …
Reasons of Power: Explaining Non-cooptation in Participatory Budgeting
Research on the use of participatory budgeting (PB) in urban politics has, perhaps not surprisingly, found that PB participants are often coopted by the government. From a realist perspective, however, it is more surprising that cooptation does not always occur and the mechanisms of non-cooptation are still not well understood. Previous research has often explained successful outcomes in terms of the ideology of incumbents or the strength of soci…
Post-Islamism and fields of contention after the Arab Spring: Feminism, Salafism and the revolutionary youth
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, conflicts in Egypt and Tunisia over the authority to rule and the role of religion in society raised questions about these societies’ capacity for reconciling differences. In retrospect, the conflicts also raise questions about the theoretical tools used to analyse regional developments. In particular, the ‘post-Islamism’ thesis has significantly changed the debates on ‘Islam and democracy’ by bringing to ligh…
A relational perspective on deliberative systems: Combining interpretive and structural analysis
Deliberative systems theory suggests that a democratic society works well when citizens’ experiences and views, as expressed in various forms and sites of communication, are connected and taken up by other citizens as well as policy-makers. Pluralism, which is not always easily reconciled with high-quality deliberation in every instance, is seen as instrumental to the realization of democratic values and sound decision-making. This perspective ra…
The Virtuous, the Critical and the Trustworthy: Citizen Ideals and Forms of Democratic Participation
A vibrant democratic society requires continuous innovation to actualize and encourage democratic ideals through participation, but no universal answers exist as to which kinds of participation are best suited to achieve this. This article demonstrates that different types of participation correlate with different citizen ideals, implying that the remedies to democratic deficits depend on which ideals need to be strengthened. Citizen survey data …
Power and Citizen Deliberation: The Contingent Impacts of Interests, Ideology, and Status Differences
Both advocates and critics of deliberative theory have regarded power relations as problems for public deliberation. Three aspects—interests, ideology and status differences—have been thought to distort deliberative processes. This article discusses a growing body of case studies that indicate that these “problems” may actually, under certain conditions, help facilitate inclusion and equality in deliberation. The crucial task is to specify the me…
Marginalization and Riots: A Rationalistic Explanation of Urban Unrest
Urban riots are typically carried out by individuals who live in residential areas that are relatively marginalized socially, economically and politically. Previous research has discussed several aspects of deprivation that may help explain this relationship. Contributing further to this research, we aim to explain why marginalization produces riots by developing a rationalistic specification of social mechanisms. The utility of our model is demo…
Cooptation and non-cooptation: Elite Strategies in Response to Social Protest
The risk of cooptation – of being absorbed by powerful elites without gaining new advantages – is an important concern in studies of social movements and social change. Through cooptation, elites undermine movements by stripping them of their credibility as agents of change. This paper aims to explain why, despite its powerful rationale, cooptation does not occur more frequently. Building on political process theory and relational sociology, it d…
Do citizens use storytelling or rational argumentation to lobby politicians
What should count as legitimate forms of reasoning in public deliberation is a contested issue. Democratic theorists have argued that storytelling may offer a more accessible form of deliberation for marginalised citizens than ‘rational argumentation’. We investigate the empirical support for this claim by examining Swedish citizens’ use of storytelling in written communication with the political establishment. We test whether stories are used fr…
Sincerity as Strategy: Green Movements and the Problem of Reconciling Deliberative and Instrumental Action
Social movements seek to influence views on environmental issues and put pressure on policy-makers in a range of related areas. But alongside their specific goals, they also often strive to create space for genuine deliberation about the need for societal transformation. This ‘dual orientation’ places them theoretically between social movement studies’ focus on strategic considerations and the ‘sincere’ (truthful) communication envisioned by demo…
Rural Arguments: Four perspectives in Swedish Political Debate
Meta-deliberation: Everyday Acts of Critical Reflection in Deliberative Systems
The term ‘meta-deliberation’ refers to processes of addressing problems with the way that conversations about shared concerns – our ordinary deliberations – proceed. This article discusses the distinction between meta-deliberation and ordinary deliberation and examines three questions raised by previous arguments about meta-deliberation: (1) what kinds of communication should count as meta-deliberation, (2) does meta-deliberation always lead to r…
Violations of basic deliberative norms: The systemic turn and problems of inclusion
What is the appropriate way to respond to actions that break basic norms of respectfulness, sincerity, and public-mindedness? At the same time as this question has become a central concern for democratic societies, a ‘systemic’ turn has unsettled established solutions for democratic theorists. From the systemic perspective, it is more important how actions contribute to public discourse than whether they meet standards of deliberation individuall…
Power Games: Elites, Movements, and Strategic Cooperation
Cooperation between movements and political elites are frequently associated with the risk of cooptation. Because it undercuts contentious actors, cooptation may seem rational for elites that seek to protect their interests. However, recent scholarship questions whether this view is empirically valid. Adding to these debates, this article demonstrates that even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that elites always act to maintain power, coop…
Why Inequalities Persist in Public Deliberation: Five Mechanisms of Marginalization
Previous research has suggested that reflective “meta-deliberation,” or discussions about how discussions proceed, can help to address patterns of marginalization. This article suggests, however, that moving to a meta level is not in itself a solution, since it may easily bring along such patterns. Inequalities persist through specific mechanisms that may be present in both ordinary deliberation and meta-deliberation. We explore such mechanisms e…
Contestation in Participatory Budgeting: Spaces, Boundaries, and Agency
Local political leaders as well as international organizations have embraced participatory budgeting in response to problems of political exclusion and citizens' dissatisfaction with representative democracy. This article provides a framework to highlight important aspects of the politics of participation. The framework allows scholars to explore how factors external to spaces of participation interact with aspects of participation within them. T…
An inclusive and participatory approach to counter-radicalization? Examining the role of Muslim associations in the Swedish policy process
Policies on preventing radicalization and recruitment to violent Islamist organizations have been widely criticized for reinforcing negative stereotypes of Muslims as a group. Sweden has stood out by international comparison by announcing an approach built on inclusion and participation, especially with regard to Muslim civil society. But what does it mean to make a policy process inclusive and participatory? How can values of inclusion and parti…
How can we trust a political leader? Ethics, institutions, and relational theory
That citizens can trust leaders in politics and the public sphere to be sincere and truthful helps to make democracy work. However, the idea of authentic communication raises both sociological and ethical questions. Scholars focusing on institutional conditions emphasize that audiences only have reasons to trust speakers that appear to have incentives to be truthful, unless they know them personally. However, theorists of ethics argue that authen…
Reflective Inclusion: Learning from Activists What Taking a Deliberative Stance Means
Researchers are increasingly recognizing that social movements are crucial for realizing deliberative democratic values. However, this raises two important questions: (1) what actions should count as deliberation and (2) whether we should demand more from activists than merely provoking or encouraging deliberation in a society. Building on current research on activists’ actual engagement with deliberation, we argue that the standard of taking a “…
Caring for Democracy: Feminist Ethics and Radical Democratic Spaces
Radical theories of democracy challenge us to consider the significance of various social conditions and practices that affect people’s possibilities to engage with social injustices. However, they still tend to obscure how political spaces are possible in the first place. How are, for instance, spaces of deliberation or agonistic contestation created and sustained over time? How do people enter them and become recognized as participants? Buildin…
Self-care as resistance: Lorde, Foucault, and playfulness
Self-care has emerged as a critical practice of resistance in the current era of far-right resurgence. Building particularly on Audre Lorde’s insights, scholars, activists, and cultural workers conceptualize self-care as an act of political defiance and a strategy of collective survival. This article brings three different views of self-care into conversation. Beginning with Lorde's vision and contrasting it with Michel Foucault's ethics of the s…
Patriarchal securitization: Epistemic domination in the politics of European agriculture
This article examines how the securitization of food production in the European Union (EU) reinforces patriarchal authority and epistemic exclusion. Building on feminist security studies, it analyzes how discourses of ‘food security’ elevate masculinized figures of authority–farmers cast as protectors and providers–while marginalizing alternative knowledges of care, sustainability, and glob al justice. The study applies frame analysis to debates …
Democracy Care in the Neoliberal City: The Ambivalent Ethics of Caring in an Uncaring World
Suppose an act of caring can be at once good, even admirable, and still help sustain a system that harms people and our shared world. In this paper, I reflect on interviews with street-level bureaucrats working with civil society to maintain and repair collective capacities for problem-solving and collective reflection in segregated Swedish cities. I want to explore how seeing their work as a form of care – as caring for democracy – may help addr…
To walk the walk: Why we need to make things personal in public deliberation
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Politics (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Law (16 works) · Social Media and Politics (15 works) · Deliberation (10 works) · Democracy (10 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Psychology (10 works)