democracy

Nicole Bedera (Affiliated Educator at the Center for Institutional Courage and co-founder of Beyond Compliance) wrote an opinion piece for MS Now about how ICE Watch is an effective tool to de-escalate violence. She describes how “the vast majority of men are only willing to engage in public violence if they feel like the people around them will approve of — and reward them for — that violence.” ICE Watch can de-escalate situations by clearly expressing disapproval for violence. Bedera’s research was also covered by MPR News.

Nicole Bedera

Sociology faculty at Florida International University are speaking out against their department’s requirement that they use a state-approved textbook to teach introductory courses. Matthew Marr (Associate Professor of Sociology at FIU) described the textbook as “scraped out” and “sanitized.” Marr described how the textbook omits key sociological concepts–such as structural racism: “Not only are these omissions an incorrect representation of the field, but they also fail to prepare students for majors and graduate education that require or recommend Introduction to Sociology.” This story was covered by Inside Higher Education and WLRN Public Media.

Matthew Marr

Cynthia Miller-Idriss (Professor of Public Affairs at American University) appeared on The Contrarian, discussing the connections between violence and masculinity. Miller-Idriss describes how people may gravitate toward a “protector” narrative of masculinity in times of economic hardship (when a “provider” narrative of masculinity is less achievable). Miller-Idriss notes that we are in a cultural moment of “hyper masculinity that associates being a man with being violent” and this image appears in recruitment for federal agencies. 

Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Tressie McMillan Cottom (Professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science) appeared on PBS News Hour to discuss how to fight political exhaustion. McMillan Cottom describes how we often feel tired from passively taking in negative news: “We are tired then, not from doing too much, but from doing too little.” She suggests that political action, rather than disengagement, is the antidote to political exhaustion: “People who feel agentic aren’t as tired; they are not as easily overwhelmed.”

Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie McMillan Cottom (Professor at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) appeared on an episode of The Opinions – a New York Times podcast – to discuss how Donald Trump has become America’s first “meme President.” McMillan Cottom commented on how Trump’s use of humor and embodiment of internet mediums has had his communication style politically effective: “We have really struggled with this in polite, elite discourse, where we associate humor with being a low form of communication, but humor resonates deeply with a cross section of people, and especially among younger people.”

Tressie McMillan Cottom

Martin Eiermann (Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) published a new book, The Limiting Principle: How Privacy Became a Public Issue, tracing the evolution of the concept of privacy and discussing conundrums of privacy in the digital age. Eiermann notes that “institutions that know a lot about our personal lives are able to comply with the letter of the law without offering informational privacy in a more substantive sense” and that people “suffer different consequences when their data is collected and analyzed.” This story was covered by UC Berkeley News.

Martin Eiermann

In response to the Department of Justice’s push to investigate the Open Society Foundations (philanthropies funded by the billionaire George Soros), several sociologists discussed the state of civil society in the United States:

Christopher Justin Einolf (Professor of Sociology at Northern Illinois University) wrote an article for The Conversation on the impact of civil society, ”the dense network of groups, communities, networks and ties that stand between the individual and the modern state”, on democracy. He explains that America has had a historically strong civil society, which helps account for our success of long term democracy. However, authoritarian leaders tend to crack down on or defund civil society organizations.

Dylan J. Riley (Professor of Sociology at Berkeley) was interviewed in Dissent Magazine. Riley highlighted the differences between the current period and interwar Europe, such as the size of civil society networks, the role of social media, and leader’s approaches to foreign policy.

Christopher Justin Einolf and Dylan J. Riley

Laura Hall’s (Associate Professor of Sociology at Carlton University) new book, Bloodied Bodies, Bloody Landscapes: Settler Colonialism in Horror!, examines the influence of settler colonialism on common tropes of the horror genre. “Who, and where, are Indigenous people in horror?,” Hall writes. “The answer: everywhere and nowhere at once. Both disappeared but also obsessed over, the imagined Indian is projected to reinforce settler colonialism.” This story was covered by Quill & Quire.

Laura Hall

Wisconsin Public Radio interviewed Allison Daminger (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) about her new book, What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life. The book examines how partners split “cognitive labor”, or, the mental effort that goes into running a household. This includes “anticipating issues, identifying options, making decisions and monitoring the results.” While most couples in the study aimed for a 50/50 split of household labor, Daminger found that cognitive labor was typically imbalanced. Among heterosexual couples, women tend to take on more cognitive labor.

Allison Daminger

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University. Ruth Braunstein (Associate Professor of Sociology at John Hopkins University) appeared on WUSA9 to discuss the broader pattern of political violence in the United States. Braunstein commented that political violence has a “tremendous chilling effect on people’s willingness to go into political life, to stand up and speak out for what they believe in.” She also discussed how distrust in political institutions may lead some individuals to violence, which can further erode trust in insituions–a “vicious cycle.” Braunstein also expressed concern to the New York Times that Kirk’s murder could mobilize right-wing groups (including militia organizations): “All it will take is the slightest hint from the political leaders, including the president, but also anyone else, that this is the moment that they’re needed.”

Ruth Braunstein

Laura Garbes (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota) wrote an op-ed for the Minnesota Star Tribune discussing how ‘elitism’ in public media stems from a lack of public funding. “Due to decades of budget cuts led by Republican administrations, public radio has become reliant on a set of mostly white, affluent donors for its financial survival,” Garbes explains. Programming, then, is catered to donor-listeners, leaving behind working-class audiences.

Laura Garbes

Protests are sweeping across France as a part of the Block Everything Movement–a campaign driven by anger over major cuts to public spending. The movement began online among right-wing voices, but has since been embraced by the political left. Quentin Ravelli (Sociologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research) discussed the movement’s lack of a clear political identity in an RFI article: “Many movements avoid being labelled left or right. This isn’t just strategic: participants often feel that consensus around economic demands matter more than political allegiance. Urgent issues like public services, wages or inflation are seen as priorities.” The movement is drawing comparisons to the 2018 Yellow Vest Movement. Antoine Bristelle (Sociologist at the Jean Jaures Foundation) commented on the demographic differences to The Gazette: “In the ‘Yellow Vest’ movement, we had a rather vulnerable France that was struggling to make ends meet, a lot of workers, a lot of retirees. Whereas here, in terms of age, it’s many young people [that have] a certain vision of the world where there is more social justice, less inequality and a political system that functions differently, better,” Bristielle said.

Quentin Ravelli

Primary season already feels interminable, and it looks like, among Republicans, Donald Trump is pulling ahead with wins in Nevada, South Carolina, and New Hampshire. The results are perplexing for our typical narratives about conservative politics for a number of reasons, but one of the most striking is that he appears to be doing pretty well with evangelical Christian voters, despite being not terribly religious himself (including a recent flub over “two Corinthians”).

Ted Cruz is a much more committed evangelical candidate. A recent piece in New Republic looks at “How Ted Cruz Lost the Evangelical Vote,” and draws on research from sociologist Lydia Bean on how a simple narrative about conservative religion and conservative politics doesn’t quite fit the reality of contemporary evangelicalism. According to the article:

Bean points out that evangelicals differ not only in their politics—with some identifying as more conservative and others as more moderate—but in their religiosity.

“Evangelicals who don’t go to church very much but identify as Christian, with Christian nationalistic rhetoric, but aren’t very well formed or advised by Christian community leaders—they’re going for Trump,” Bean says. “I think Ted Cruz is picking up the older, more observant people who are theologically and politically conservative, the people who actually go to church every week.” Rubio, meanwhile, “is picking up the younger, more cosmopolitan evangelicals…”

The relationship between religion and politics is complicated, just like any other ideological system. The most interesting sociological point in Bean’s research, though, is how different styles of practice within similar religious communities can teach people to look at politics and their choices in different ways.

Philosopher Peter Ludlow, a faculty member at Northwestern University, writes in a recent post for “The Stone” blog on NYTimes.com that, instead of undermining systems and generally acting immorally, people like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden took real risks to expose what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of systemic evil.” In a lengthy dissection, Ludlow looks at the leaks that so many have condemned and, noting that one of Aaron Swartz’s self-professed favorite books was the sociology text Moral Mazes, and finds an emerging extra-institutional morality across the cases. Ludlow concludes:

…if there are psychological motivations for whistleblowing, leaking and hacktivism, there are likewise psychological motivations for closing ranks with the power structure within a system — in this case a system in which corporate media plays an important role. Similarly it is possible that the system itself is sick, even though the actors within the organization are behaving in accord with organizational etiquette and respecting the internal bonds of trust.

Just as Hannah Arendt saw that the combined action of loyal managers can give rise to unspeakable systemic evil, so too generation W has seen that complicity within the surveillance state can give rise to evil as well — not the horrific evil that Eichmann’s bureaucratic efficiency brought us, but still an Orwellian future that must be avoided at all costs.

For more on weighing the costs and benefits of surveillance, be sure to check out “A Social Welfare Critique of Contemporary Crime Control” and pretty much all of the Community Page Cyborgology here on TSP. For more on moral ambiguity, consider Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall (updated and released in paperback by Oxford University Press in 2009) and Teaching TSP’s piece on the “Obedience to Authority” and the Milgram experiments.

The opening ceremony of the Olympics is not short on inspiring imagery for the many millions who tune in around the globe. As the host country provides the spectacle and entertainment, athletes representing their respective countries march one after the other to cheers of the crowd. With such cooperation in the name of athletic competition, the Olympics can’t help but be a large step towards worldwide transparency, peace and equality. Right?

In a recent New York Times editorial, David Clay Large, a professor of history at Montana State University, suggests otherwise. Drawing on analysis of the 1936 Berlin Games, Large explains that there is little evidence that the Olympics works to open up repressive regimes. In fact, the inspiring tales of the Olympics taming Hitler’s Nazi regime are mostly myth.

The Olympics gave the Nazis a lesson in how to hide their vicious racism and anti-Semitism, and should offer today’s International Olympic Committee a cautionary tale when considering the location of future events.

While few would argue that the Berlin Olympics transformed Nazi Germany into the ideal international partner, it is commonly said that Hitler did reduce persecution of Jewish people during that time.

But the truth is more nuanced. Although the regime did discourage open anti-Semitism, this directive pertained only to Berlin. Outside the capital, the Nuremberg Laws remained in full effect.

Large explains that through employing deceitful tactics throughout the Olympics the Nazis learned how was easy it was to mislead the global public through superficial changes.

The article continues with Large deconstructing other pervasive myths about the value of the Berlin Games, including the well-told stories about the impact of Jesse Owens’ dominance. According to Large, the black American track-and-field athlete, did not simply force the Germans and people everywhere to rethink negative views towards black people; rather, the victory simply led to the group in power using the success to enforce negative views.

[T]he publicity surrounding black athletes’ success simply taught the Nazis how to refine existing stereotypes. Instead of arguing that those athletes were physically inferior, they disparaged them as freaks who, because of their “jungle inheritance,” were able to jump high and run fast.

Large’s presentation of “the truth behind the 1936 Games” effectively calls into question many of the underlying assumptions about the positive impacts of holding the Olympics and other large international sporting events in countries with questionable governance and a history of mistreating citizens. And, as Large points out,

there is little evidence so far that the 2008 Beijing Olympics did anything but show the Chinese government how to maintain its clamp on freedom while supposedly opening its doors to the world.

Large concludes with a critical but potentially positive suggestion:

This is not to say that the Games should be held only in politically “clean” countries. But instead of blindly celebrating the alleged openness of repressive regimes that host the event, the international community should use it as an opportunity to hold them to the values that the Olympics claim to represent.

Sarah K. Cowan, a sociology and demography  grad student at UC Berkeley, recently asked CNN readers, “What if a President served 42 years?”   That’s how long Moammar Gadhafi has been the leader in Libya, which could be equated to Richard Nixon still serving as President of the United States today rather than leaving office in 1974.

In a healthy democracy, citizens see multiple leaders of government in their lifetime. Doing so allows them to compare leaders, form political preferences and to participate meaningfully in the political process by voting in truly competitive elections.

But, in many countries, a large portion of the population has only experienced one leader.

…Seventy-nine percent of Libyans have lived their entire lives under Gadhafi’s rule. Before the revolution in Egypt, 60 percent of Egyptians had lived their lives under President Hosni Mubarak exclusively. Sixty-one percent of Zimbabweans have only known Robert Mugabe’s rule. By contrast, the longest American presidency was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s; he was elected four times, to serve for a total of 16 years, of which he served 12 before his death…

According to Cowan, two main factors have led to situations where much of the population knows only one leader.  First, that leader remained in power and disregarded or never established term limits.  Second, the populations in these countries are comparatively young.

Twenty percent of people in Mozambique have lived their entire lives under Armando Guebuza, and they are all under age 7. The population is so young because women in Mozambique have a lot of children — more than five on average — and people die young — at age 48 on average. (The age of the population can have a powerful effect on these calculations: If Libya had the same age profile as the much older population of the U.S., 57% of the population would have known Gadhafi as the only leader during their lifetime, compared with the 79% who actually did.)

Opinions on the benefits of long-standing rulers vary.  Some scholars argue that they create political and social vacuums and stunt economic growth, while others argue that, under the right conditions, long tenures may lead to economic growth.  Either way, Cowan says:

Leaving aside whether lengthy tenures are beneficial for economies, they violate democratic principles. It is a characteristic that distinguishes democracies from authoritarian regimes; in a democracy, the leader changes in a reasonable time frame. Term limits, confidence votes for parliamentary systems of government and regular and fair elections are all means by which to prevent “presidents for life.”