Cliff Zukin, Scott Keeter, Molly Andolina, Krista Jenkins, and Michael X. Delli Carpini
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195183177
- eISBN:
- 9780199850822
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195183177.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
In searching for answers as to why young people differ vastly from their parents and grandparents when it comes to turning out the vote, this book challenges the conventional wisdom that today's ...
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In searching for answers as to why young people differ vastly from their parents and grandparents when it comes to turning out the vote, this book challenges the conventional wisdom that today's youth is plagued by a severe case of political apathy. In order to understand the current nature of citizen engagement, it is critical to separate political from civic engagement. Using the results from an original set of surveys and primary research, the book concludes that while older citizens participate by voting, young people engage by volunteering and being active in their communities.Less
In searching for answers as to why young people differ vastly from their parents and grandparents when it comes to turning out the vote, this book challenges the conventional wisdom that today's youth is plagued by a severe case of political apathy. In order to understand the current nature of citizen engagement, it is critical to separate political from civic engagement. Using the results from an original set of surveys and primary research, the book concludes that while older citizens participate by voting, young people engage by volunteering and being active in their communities.
Christopher P. Loss
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691148274
- eISBN:
- 9781400840052
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691148274.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter depicts the challenges posed to higher education during the Cold War. Despite suffering a torrent of anticommunist attacks—and more than a few casualties—higher education also played a ...
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This chapter depicts the challenges posed to higher education during the Cold War. Despite suffering a torrent of anticommunist attacks—and more than a few casualties—higher education also played a leading role in the government's battle for hearts and minds in the 1950s. At home and abroad the American state deployed education in order to produce democratic citizens and then used public opinion polls to evaluate the integrity of the production process. Obsessively tracked during the Cold War, “public opinion” offered policymakers and educational elites access to the American people's collective psychological adjustment and mental health, to their intellectual fitness and their knowledge of the bipolar Cold War world in which they lived.Less
This chapter depicts the challenges posed to higher education during the Cold War. Despite suffering a torrent of anticommunist attacks—and more than a few casualties—higher education also played a leading role in the government's battle for hearts and minds in the 1950s. At home and abroad the American state deployed education in order to produce democratic citizens and then used public opinion polls to evaluate the integrity of the production process. Obsessively tracked during the Cold War, “public opinion” offered policymakers and educational elites access to the American people's collective psychological adjustment and mental health, to their intellectual fitness and their knowledge of the bipolar Cold War world in which they lived.
Duana Fullwiley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691123165
- eISBN:
- 9781400840410
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691123165.003.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter explores prevailing attitudes in Senegal about sickle cell anemia and its biomedical and political stewards. It also looks at how the Senegalese have had to perform the discursive double ...
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This chapter explores prevailing attitudes in Senegal about sickle cell anemia and its biomedical and political stewards. It also looks at how the Senegalese have had to perform the discursive double duty of protesting public neglect and political apathy with regard to the disease, while promoting a self-based conception of vitality for those who have the capacity to “live well” with it. Their frustration that Senegal's health ministry, and larger government, has long ignored sickle cell as a public health problem, is articulated alongside their own strength and will to live “normally.” This chapter takes a closer look at this configuration of crisis and subsequent contrary affirmation of an intuited, lived (but not yet officially sanctioned) description of the nature of things.Less
This chapter explores prevailing attitudes in Senegal about sickle cell anemia and its biomedical and political stewards. It also looks at how the Senegalese have had to perform the discursive double duty of protesting public neglect and political apathy with regard to the disease, while promoting a self-based conception of vitality for those who have the capacity to “live well” with it. Their frustration that Senegal's health ministry, and larger government, has long ignored sickle cell as a public health problem, is articulated alongside their own strength and will to live “normally.” This chapter takes a closer look at this configuration of crisis and subsequent contrary affirmation of an intuited, lived (but not yet officially sanctioned) description of the nature of things.
Ben Berger
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691144689
- eISBN:
- 9781400840311
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691144689.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Democratization
Handwringing about political apathy is as old as democracy itself. As early as 425 BC, the playwright Aristophanes ridiculed his fellow Athenians for gossiping in the market instead of voting. In ...
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Handwringing about political apathy is as old as democracy itself. As early as 425 BC, the playwright Aristophanes ridiculed his fellow Athenians for gossiping in the market instead of voting. In more recent decades, calls for greater civic engagement as a democratic cure-all have met with widespread agreement. But how realistic, or helpful, is it to expect citizens to devote more attention and energy to politics? This book provides a surprising new perspective on the problem of civic engagement, challenging idealists who aspire to revolutionize democracies and their citizens, but also taking issue with cynics who think that citizens cannot, and need not, do better. “Civic engagement” has become an unwieldy and confusing catchall, the book argues. We should talk instead of political, social, and moral engagement, figuring out which kinds of engagement make democracy work better, and how we might promote them. Focusing on political engagement and taking Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt as guides, the book identifies ways to achieve the political engagement we want and need without resorting to coercive measures such as compulsory national service or mandatory voting. By providing a realistic account of the value of political engagement and practical strategies for improving it, while avoiding proposals we can never hope to achieve, the book makes a persuasive case for a public philosophy that much of the public can actually endorse.Less
Handwringing about political apathy is as old as democracy itself. As early as 425 BC, the playwright Aristophanes ridiculed his fellow Athenians for gossiping in the market instead of voting. In more recent decades, calls for greater civic engagement as a democratic cure-all have met with widespread agreement. But how realistic, or helpful, is it to expect citizens to devote more attention and energy to politics? This book provides a surprising new perspective on the problem of civic engagement, challenging idealists who aspire to revolutionize democracies and their citizens, but also taking issue with cynics who think that citizens cannot, and need not, do better. “Civic engagement” has become an unwieldy and confusing catchall, the book argues. We should talk instead of political, social, and moral engagement, figuring out which kinds of engagement make democracy work better, and how we might promote them. Focusing on political engagement and taking Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt as guides, the book identifies ways to achieve the political engagement we want and need without resorting to coercive measures such as compulsory national service or mandatory voting. By providing a realistic account of the value of political engagement and practical strategies for improving it, while avoiding proposals we can never hope to achieve, the book makes a persuasive case for a public philosophy that much of the public can actually endorse.
MARC BRODIE
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199270552
- eISBN:
- 9780191710254
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199270552.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, Social History
This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. It argues that the image of a populist Conservatism and a political apathy growing in the late Victorian and Edwardian period out of an ...
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This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. It argues that the image of a populist Conservatism and a political apathy growing in the late Victorian and Edwardian period out of an abjectly poor East End is wrong. The examination of ‘models’ put forward by historians to support this idea has suggested that few were built upon a solid base of evidence, and that they often relied heavily upon superficial and unjustified assumptions regarding poverty, race, and religion. The politics of the East End working class were far more complex than these models allow.Less
This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. It argues that the image of a populist Conservatism and a political apathy growing in the late Victorian and Edwardian period out of an abjectly poor East End is wrong. The examination of ‘models’ put forward by historians to support this idea has suggested that few were built upon a solid base of evidence, and that they often relied heavily upon superficial and unjustified assumptions regarding poverty, race, and religion. The politics of the East End working class were far more complex than these models allow.
Katherine Natanel
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780520285255
- eISBN:
- 9780520960794
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520285255.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
In the wake of continuing violence in Israel-Palestine, Sustaining Conflict examines how occupation, colonization, and domination are maintained not only through social sanction and popular support ...
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In the wake of continuing violence in Israel-Palestine, Sustaining Conflict examines how occupation, colonization, and domination are maintained not only through social sanction and popular support but also through the production of political apathy. Exploring the attitudes and experiences of self-defined leftist Jewish Israelis living in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, Katherine Natanel reveals how political depression, disengagement, and inaction serve to normalize the reality of violence and control. However, rather than signaling a state of passivity or an absence of care, here apathy takes shape as a form of active disengagement—a kind of hoping, trying, building, believing, knowing, relating, engaging, and acting oriented toward self-preservation. By shifting focus from violence to normalcy, Sustaining Conflict highlights how micro-political logics and social mechanisms maintain macro-political power in Israel-Palestine. Importantly, Natanel’s account argues that gender uniquely structures the expression and practice of apathy among leftist Jewish Israelis, sewing conflict deep into everyday life and shaping political action. Through a combination of ethnographic material, narrative, and political, cultural, and feminist theory, Natanel develops a groundbreaking theory that opens a new conversation about Israel-Palestine, one in which political apathy is taken seriously and regarded as significant to the future of the region.Less
In the wake of continuing violence in Israel-Palestine, Sustaining Conflict examines how occupation, colonization, and domination are maintained not only through social sanction and popular support but also through the production of political apathy. Exploring the attitudes and experiences of self-defined leftist Jewish Israelis living in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, Katherine Natanel reveals how political depression, disengagement, and inaction serve to normalize the reality of violence and control. However, rather than signaling a state of passivity or an absence of care, here apathy takes shape as a form of active disengagement—a kind of hoping, trying, building, believing, knowing, relating, engaging, and acting oriented toward self-preservation. By shifting focus from violence to normalcy, Sustaining Conflict highlights how micro-political logics and social mechanisms maintain macro-political power in Israel-Palestine. Importantly, Natanel’s account argues that gender uniquely structures the expression and practice of apathy among leftist Jewish Israelis, sewing conflict deep into everyday life and shaping political action. Through a combination of ethnographic material, narrative, and political, cultural, and feminist theory, Natanel develops a groundbreaking theory that opens a new conversation about Israel-Palestine, one in which political apathy is taken seriously and regarded as significant to the future of the region.
KLAUS HENTSCHEL
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199205660
- eISBN:
- 9780191709388
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199205660.003.0012
- Subject:
- Physics, History of Physics
Post-war Germans were sick and tired of ideology after the constant flood of Nazi propaganda. The curiously flowery rhetoric of the Third Reich (LTI) was replaced by a ‘neue Sachlichkeit’, as ...
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Post-war Germans were sick and tired of ideology after the constant flood of Nazi propaganda. The curiously flowery rhetoric of the Third Reich (LTI) was replaced by a ‘neue Sachlichkeit’, as exemplified here by Friedrich Hund. But too easily did this stark style slip into euphemistic downplaying of past insufficiencies. Political aloofness by scholars was a heritage of the Weimar period. But under denazification, political apathy came to signify absolution from complicity during the intervening political period.Less
Post-war Germans were sick and tired of ideology after the constant flood of Nazi propaganda. The curiously flowery rhetoric of the Third Reich (LTI) was replaced by a ‘neue Sachlichkeit’, as exemplified here by Friedrich Hund. But too easily did this stark style slip into euphemistic downplaying of past insufficiencies. Political aloofness by scholars was a heritage of the Weimar period. But under denazification, political apathy came to signify absolution from complicity during the intervening political period.
Lucy Robinson
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074349
- eISBN:
- 9781781701591
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074349.003.0008
- Subject:
- Political Science, UK Politics
Although identity politics tends to concentrate on novelty, it has developed in an ongoing series of reactions to both past and present. Gay politics did not develop in isolation and then force ...
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Although identity politics tends to concentrate on novelty, it has developed in an ongoing series of reactions to both past and present. Gay politics did not develop in isolation and then force itself on the Left's agenda. It was forged in the counter-cultural milieu between radical and reformist politics. Despite points of unity, like Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, overall we can trace a development along a broad continuum, with a consolidation of the themes that divide the Left from gay activism. This is a partial explanation of the state of protest and politics today, when the traditional institutions of both reform and revolt appear to offer no attraction and personal politics can be misread as political apathy. This concluding chapter looks at the emergence of more recent political activism, such as The Unity Coalition — RESPECT, and the ways in which New Labour has negotiated the politics of sexuality. It evaluates the ‘apathy’ that has been read into falling electoral participation, challenging the popular idea that young people are more interested in reality television than in politics.Less
Although identity politics tends to concentrate on novelty, it has developed in an ongoing series of reactions to both past and present. Gay politics did not develop in isolation and then force itself on the Left's agenda. It was forged in the counter-cultural milieu between radical and reformist politics. Despite points of unity, like Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, overall we can trace a development along a broad continuum, with a consolidation of the themes that divide the Left from gay activism. This is a partial explanation of the state of protest and politics today, when the traditional institutions of both reform and revolt appear to offer no attraction and personal politics can be misread as political apathy. This concluding chapter looks at the emergence of more recent political activism, such as The Unity Coalition — RESPECT, and the ways in which New Labour has negotiated the politics of sexuality. It evaluates the ‘apathy’ that has been read into falling electoral participation, challenging the popular idea that young people are more interested in reality television than in politics.
Peter Hall
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9781861349842
- eISBN:
- 9781447302711
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781861349842.003.0015
- Subject:
- Sociology, Urban and Rural Studies
This chapter discusses the thoughts of the Londoners about their future and the future of their city. In particular, it aims to discover whether they feel a sense of influence over the course of ...
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This chapter discusses the thoughts of the Londoners about their future and the future of their city. In particular, it aims to discover whether they feel a sense of influence over the course of events. It aims to determine their political involvement and political apathy. In this chapter, most of the people interviewed were not actively involved nor wanted to get involved, however, at the very least, they were prepared to vote. Their apathy towards political involvement were due to various reasons such as lack of time, involvement in local activities particularly those that concern their children, and taking the initiative to change their local world. Issues discussed herein include: consultation and cynicism; getting involved; and silent majority and unsilent minority.Less
This chapter discusses the thoughts of the Londoners about their future and the future of their city. In particular, it aims to discover whether they feel a sense of influence over the course of events. It aims to determine their political involvement and political apathy. In this chapter, most of the people interviewed were not actively involved nor wanted to get involved, however, at the very least, they were prepared to vote. Their apathy towards political involvement were due to various reasons such as lack of time, involvement in local activities particularly those that concern their children, and taking the initiative to change their local world. Issues discussed herein include: consultation and cynicism; getting involved; and silent majority and unsilent minority.
José Alaniz
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604733662
- eISBN:
- 9781604733679
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604733662.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
This chapter focuses on the political apathy, hegemony, and outright censorship that has characterized the rare attempts at sociopolitical critique in contemporary comic art in Russia. It discusses ...
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This chapter focuses on the political apathy, hegemony, and outright censorship that has characterized the rare attempts at sociopolitical critique in contemporary comic art in Russia. It discusses the paucity of “politkomiks” and why more artists did not use comics to speak out about the many ills in society. It also comments on the komiksisty’s lack of concern about politics in contrast to Russian politicians’ interest in komiks and cartoons.Less
This chapter focuses on the political apathy, hegemony, and outright censorship that has characterized the rare attempts at sociopolitical critique in contemporary comic art in Russia. It discusses the paucity of “politkomiks” and why more artists did not use comics to speak out about the many ills in society. It also comments on the komiksisty’s lack of concern about politics in contrast to Russian politicians’ interest in komiks and cartoons.
Joel Best
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520246263
- eISBN:
- 9780520932357
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520246263.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Research and Statistics
Americans have always had to deal with change, and they often worried about it—such as those modern railroads, which, for example, critics warned impelled people at unnatural speeds that threatened ...
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Americans have always had to deal with change, and they often worried about it—such as those modern railroads, which, for example, critics warned impelled people at unnatural speeds that threatened their health. Undoubtedly, every change, every new invention, new law, or new social arrangement motivates opposition, or at least anxiety. There are always critics, doubters, and worriers who warn that a given change will make things worse. The most intense forms of doubts about change involve doomsday scenarios—ecological devastation, economic collapse, war, plague, and famine—but people also hear warnings about plenty of less apocalyptic threats, such as the declining middle class, growing immorality, increasing political apathy, and so on. Even the most common changes present challenges. New inventions, such as cell phones today, change personal relationships, business transactions, and who knows what else. Faster transportation and communication make it simpler to reach new ideas and new products, but also generate new diseases and new problems.Less
Americans have always had to deal with change, and they often worried about it—such as those modern railroads, which, for example, critics warned impelled people at unnatural speeds that threatened their health. Undoubtedly, every change, every new invention, new law, or new social arrangement motivates opposition, or at least anxiety. There are always critics, doubters, and worriers who warn that a given change will make things worse. The most intense forms of doubts about change involve doomsday scenarios—ecological devastation, economic collapse, war, plague, and famine—but people also hear warnings about plenty of less apocalyptic threats, such as the declining middle class, growing immorality, increasing political apathy, and so on. Even the most common changes present challenges. New inventions, such as cell phones today, change personal relationships, business transactions, and who knows what else. Faster transportation and communication make it simpler to reach new ideas and new products, but also generate new diseases and new problems.
