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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Putting Experts In Their Place: The Challenge Of Expanding Participation While Solving Problems, Thad Williamson
Putting Experts In Their Place: The Challenge Of Expanding Participation While Solving Problems, Thad Williamson
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
This essay critically examines possibilities for expanding democratic participatory governance in light of Mark Bevir's treatment of the subject in his book Democratic Governance. The essay argues that a theory of participatory governance should retain an explicit role for expert analysis, and that the appropriate scope given to such analysis will vary by policy area. The essay also argues that the present organization of capitalist economies mandates a heavy reliance on experts, and that a full-blown account of expanding participatory governance thus must be paired with an account of how to achieve a more democratic political economy. Such an account …
Changing The People, Not Simply The President: The Limitations And Possibilities Of The Obama Presidency, In Tocquevillian Perspective, Thad Williamson
Changing The People, Not Simply The President: The Limitations And Possibilities Of The Obama Presidency, In Tocquevillian Perspective, Thad Williamson
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
Attempting to elucidate what precisely Alexis de Tocqueville would have made of either Barack Obama the politician or the astonishing political phenomenon that swept the nation's first African-American president into office in 2008 is a fruitless endeavor. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville devotes relatively little attention to the presidency as an institution, and still less to the merits and accomplishments of particular presidents. In his account, what made American democracy unique and functional was neither its federalist institutional arrangements nor the virtues of its national leaders, but its culture of political participation in local democratic institutions. Tocqueville recognized the power …