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Criticizes the conventional unitary understanding of the relationship between citizenship and the state by showing how poorly this model fits with contemporary political practices in Canada and elsewhere. Instead of unique, exclusive, compartmentalized forms of political membership, we find multiple memberships and overlapping identities along three dimensions of citizenship: the legal, the psychological and the political. The chapter argues that these ways of recognizing collective identity are generally morally permissible and sometimes even morally required under a conception of justice as evenhandedness.

This conclusion gives short restatements on two fronts. First, it comments briefly on how the author's model of ‘democratic deliberation within’ compares with, and improves upon, existing models. Second, it provides some brief indications of the scope of required changes to existing political practice.

This chapter focuses on the identification of the characteristic features of the practice of politics. It begins with the discussion of the concept of the political. It highlights the achievement that is realized whenever an elaborate set of political practices of the type with which Weber was concerned is institutionalized. It demonstrates how public law forms a distinctive aspect of political practice. It shows that politics is rooted in human conflict arising from the struggle to realize the varying ideals of the good life.

This chapter examines some key ways in which post-Marxist and related intellectual work (such as that of Judith Butler and Richard Rorty) conceives of itself as intervention, pursuing the matter of how institutional intellectual work construes itself whenever it seeks to be or affect an intervention. It explores this by considering some exemplary encounters at the borders of post-Marxism that look at the heart of the problem. These encounters and accounts, the chapter argues, reveal the form, orientation, hopes, and often less-than-explicitly declared or avowed metaphysical rationales, fantasies and presuppositions of much theory about political practice. The chapter explores the way theory and practice are thought, examining the way that certain of Laclau’s key engagements with other approaches have been orientated, organised and executed.

The Introduction outlines the contents of the book. The book contains a number of chapters related to each other with respect to certain Russian elite informal and archaic political practices that include the personification of power as reflected in political “clan” and “family circle” networks, elite oligarchy combined with autocracy, and a host of lesser but strongly suggestive practices. Although the focus is on the formative Stalin period, the book looks both forward and backward in time from there.

This chapter describes democracy as a novel feature in Britain that grafted on to pre-existing constitutional structure. Democracy in Britain was in the form of universal suffrage that was accepted as an uninteresting matter of political practice long before any enthusiasm developed for democracy as a set of political ideals that was worthy to be promoted for its own sake. It was not until 1960 that the attitude of the citizens and the government began to change and they started to view democracy as a challenging and a good structure.

This introductory chapter opens with a brief description of the novel populist mobilization practices that Peruvian political actors elaborated over the course of their 1931 presidential campaigns—the book’s central outcome of interest. It then endeavors to accomplish four things. First, it establishes the significance of, and outlines what is puzzling about, this outcome from a historical perspective. Second, it translates the historical puzzle into more theoretical terms, framing the outcome as a case of change in repertoires of political practice. Third, it assesses existing ways of explaining repertoire change that can be found in the literatures on social movements and contentious politics, highlighting strengths and deficiencies. Finally, it develops a framework for explaining political innovation that is based in part on pragmatist theories of action and specifies how the book’s substantive argument will be developed in the remaining chapters.

This chapter begins by discussing the possibility to reconfigure the architecture of public law by tracing the intellectual source of the modern rights movement and chart its influence on contemporary legal and political practice. It investigates how a political discourse of natural rights has permeated legal discourse and then, through positivisation — that is, through the institutionalization of a conception of law as an expression of basic rights — has reconfigured the relationship between law and government. It assesses the impact of rights discourse on contemporary public law.

This chapter circumscribes the book’s outcome theoretically by sketching a definition of “populist mobilization” and clarifying how this differs from other modes of political practice. It then goes on to substantiate the outcome empirically by demonstrating that 1931 did indeed mark a moment of profound transformation in the Peruvian political repertoire. It does this through a survey of how political practice changed in Peru between when the country achieved independence from Spain, in the early nineteenth century, and the second half of the twentieth century.

This chapter excavates the sources of political innovation in the first few months of electoral campaigning in Peru’s 1931 election. At this critical moment, collective actors from across the political spectrum faced new challenges and opportunities, but they responded to these differently. Some continued to act in routine ways, while others began to cobble together novel packages of political practices. Through comparison of the initial actions of all major contenders, this chapter explains this variation. The explanation centers around an understanding of how these actors’ perceptions of the situation and of their practical strategic options were shaped by their previous experiences, worldviews, and habits of thought. Only the leadership of Luis M. Sánchez Cerro’s and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre’s embryonic parties (Unión Revolucionaria and APRA) experienced the moment as constituting a critical problem situation that required a break with previous routines and a creative turn toward new forms of action. As these leaders began to experiment with new practices, it was their previous experiences—filtered through deliberative environments that facilitated radical departures from the norm—that led their practices to take on the characteristics of what would become a distinctly Latin American style of populist mobilization.

This chapter talks about the gendering of Mexican transmigrant political participation, and places it within the context of hometown associations. It first argues that Mexican politics in the United States are not gender neutral. One section summarizes the research methods that were utilized in gathering the information where the discussion is based. The next section takes a look at the background on Mexican migrant- and state-led transnationalism, before shifting to an analysis of the gendering of migrant political practice and organizations. The chapter ends with a study of the implications of the analysis, and provides some conclusions and suggestions for future research.

This chapter examines the political conceptions of nature in Tokugawa, Japan. It analyzes the homologous characteristics that make these different natures comparable and which set them apart from later ideas in the Meiji and Taisho eras. The chapter outlines assumptions common to most Tokugawa views of nature and details the variety of politically meaningful senses of nature. It suggests that a belief shared by almost all these contending positions is that nature provided a sanctioned locale for correct political practice.

This chapter explores how political theology is, in a plural age, a necessarily comparative enterprise. Reflection about political practices and norms and political engagement require encounters with those of different normative viewpoints and those who are citizens of other political orders, necessitating communicative clarity across divergent background assumptions, worldviews, and legitimating norms. Political theology as a discipline has not yet developed a robust justification for the comparative enterprise. The chapter examines the challenges in the related field of comparative religious ethics—a field from which lessons can be drawn about the need for systematic and methodological clarity about the goals for and possibilities of comparative political theology.

This chapter analyzes individual responses to open-ended questions posed to a national sample of voters in 2000, to identify dominant trends in public opinion that remain as true now as then. Citizens across Japan use practices in their everyday lives to construct a definition of democracy that involves questioning the status quo and tradition, listening to diverse perspectives, encouraging participation and innovation, deliberating alternatives, and exposing the processes of decision-making. Japanese voters complain that elite political practices are far removed from their understanding of what democracy is and how it should be practiced. They criticize closed decision-making processes and the inability of politicians to offer concrete, detailed policy alternatives to the problems that concern voters most. Their changing attitudes about democracy and its practice provide a context for understanding observed patterns of participation in local politics and their implications for national political change.

This concluding chapter offers concrete examples of political action by women and for women that is inextricable from the cognitive processes that are mobilized in political conversation, study and lifelong learning, and local political action. It examines how the state's interest in bringing citizens into collaborative relationships to solve problems coalesces with citizens' demands for direct participation. Japanese women are thus placed at the center of a struggle to harness human capital to achieve state developmental goals. The process by which everyday citizens convert basic education into knowledge for empowerment raises important questions for further research on the potential for lifelong learning to empower underrepresented and socially disadvantaged groups in the political process. The chapter concludes with reflections on the potential and limits of lifelong learning in promoting political deliberation, a more inclusive democracy, and more representative outcomes.

This chapter explains how the new populist practices developed in 1931 became routinized in Peru. Just because a political actor does something does not mean that this action will succeed or that it will become a go-to political practice for others. For this new practice to enter into the repertoire in a stable way, it has to be repeated by others; and for this to happen, it has to resonate with popular audiences and be recognized as useful by other political actors. Populist mobilization, although new for the context, shared enough similarities with previous ideas and practices to avoid appearing entirely foreign to popular audiences; it produced recognizable successes for its practitioners; and it was subsequently picked up by other Peruvian actors. Furthermore, the fact that politicians in other Latin American countries were aware of these events played an important—though by no means simplistically determinative—role in the development of populist strategies elsewhere in the region. This chapter demonstrates that this was the case and shows how it happened.

This chapter introduces two sets of focus group participants—all women of voting age living in the Tokyo metropolitan area. These women use emphatic narratives about education, self-improvement, community, and national development when talking about electoral participation. They assume responsibility for teaching themselves and analyze their own interactions with the state in everyday life as their primary data source for evaluating national politics. Participants transform the focus group into a “community of practice” and through this process provide insight into how any study group, regardless of topic, upends traditional modes of knowledge production. Women's study groups yield alternative definitions of democracy and political practices that clash with “elite” national politics in Japan.