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This chapter analyses the 2012 election of Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales in detail and draws upon analyses by electoral specialists as well as examining the often defensive views of the commissioners themselves. There was a very low turnout in the election and this has led some to challenge the PCCs’ legitimacy. There are lessons to be absorbed before elections are held again.

Many observers believed the state of Florida was trending blue after Barack Obama won it twice, but instead Republicans have since won nearly every statewide election after 2012. What happened? This chapter explores the grassroots organizing strategies of presidential and statewide candidate-led political campaigns in Florida’s pivotal I-4 corridor. After Obama built a formidable ground game, the state Democratic Party allowed it to wither, and neither Hillary Clinton in 2016 nor Andrew Gillum in 2018 built a comparable operation. Meanwhile, Florida Republicans and Koch-aligned groups deliberately—and successfully—imitated and adapted Obama’s organizational strategies. Unless Democrats rebuild, Florida will likely be red for the foreseeable future.

This chapter reviews the findings of the book and explores the implications of the online social media going forward. The chapter sums up the major patterns that have emerged since the wider adoption of social media in the political sphere and considers the implications of this type of change for the future of the American political system. Using the 2012 election, the chapter explores the importance of viral videos and websites such as YouTube, integrated campaign strategies, and the efficiency of online campaigning in contrast to the more expensive traditional methods. The chapter concludes with thoughts on the broader implications of social media as an increasingly integral part of the political campaign.

The final chapter explores what happens when the ‘hegemonic domination’ sketched out previously reaches its limits. It shows how youth anti-government protests that started in 2011 utilise the discursive repertoires of dominant ideology to challenge the dominance of the regime. By disassembling the discursive and performative reactions by various social actors to those events the chapter draws back together the different elements that make up the modalities of power in Angola analysed separately in the previous chapters. Although the demonstrations could not decisively change the outcome of the 2012 elections, these first protests did significantly impact on the dynamics of Angolan political culture, triggering strong reactions by a vast array of social actors and sketching out the possibility of change.

This chapter ties together the previous four concepts, showing the ways that these burgeoning forms of citizenship have been reinforced and sometimes slightly modified in the years since the 2010 cycle. By bringing in examples from the 2012 elections, this chapter focuses on a broad view of how emerging phenomena turn into existing practices and highlights important, new trends that appeared on the scene more recently, such as analytics-based messaging and the rise of hubs for activism on campaign websites, contributing to the constantly evolving practice of building our current democratic culture. This chapter discusses how those that have preceded it upend the dominant orthodoxies of campaign communication and provide an overall optimist view of citizenship moving forward.

The fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention that began in 1979 provided the GOP the opportunity to close the deal with white southern voters. Fundamentalist members, anxious over social changes, successfully executed a decades-long plan to seize control of reshape the SBC to reflect their extremist views. They exiled moderates from the denomination almost entirely and re-codified the inferior status of women in the church; biblical inerrancy and absolutism triumphed over interpretation and compromise. The absolutism in terms of religious doctrine gave way to an absolutism in public policy, hyper-partisanship, and demand for political action. In order to court southern evangelical voters, the Republican Party took increasingly hardline stances on issues like gay marriage and abortion under the banner of family values, a slogan cribbed from the anti-feminists who had been propping up white supremacy in the South for generations.

The relationship between the GOP and the Christian Right became so fundamental to the party’s success that Republicans constantly had to maintain a sense of urgency regarding the country’s moral compass. Moreover, to retain the loyalty of southern white religious voters, the GOP not only prioritized social conservative policy issues like gay marriage, but it also repackaged “secular” issues regarding the environment, the economy, and even war as issues of religious-political concern. By doing so, the GOP created a religious-partisan brand that dissolved denominational differences, overcame third-party challenges from Christian Right leaders, and softened the Christian authenticity litmus test for candidates. To that end, the religiosity of the contemporary GOP is not solely a reflection of the rising saliency of moral issues; rather, via the Long Southern Strategy, almost every issue became part of the evangelical cosmology in a spirit of Christian nationalism inherent in southern white identity.

This chapter outlines the individual grievances arising from political, economic, social, and religious conditions under the government of Mohamed Morsi that became the foundations of opposition to his rule. It focuses on democracy in Egypt, the 2012 presidential elections, and the expectations and promises put forth by Morsi. The chapter also covers popular perceptions of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice Party, grievances surrounding electricity and gas, security and sexual harassment, Morsi’s speeches and representation of Egypt on the international stage, and Morsi’s political appointments. The chapter relies on interview data and fieldwork conducted in Egypt during the year of Morsi’s presidency.