By Kyriakos N. Demetriou (auth.), Kyriakos N. Demetriou (eds.)
,The papers during this assortment, written through a cross-regional crew of specialists, offer insights into the motives of declining degrees of citizen participation and different specific sorts of civic activism in Europe and discover a variety of elements contributing to apathy and finally disengagement from very important political procedures and associations. even as, this quantity examines casual or unconventional varieties of civic engagement and political participation comparable to the fast advances in tradition, know-how and social networking. the amount is split into 3 interrelated elements: half I includes serious essays within the type of theoretical methods to analysing weakening political participation and citizen estrangement; half II is devoted to an exploration of the position and deployment of technologically complicated media, resembling the net, as determinants of fixing styles of political participationist behaviour. eventually, half III provides findings of empirical study at the factor of political participation. Combining theoretical and empirical views, the publication contributes in the direction of a greater figuring out of the disquietingtrend ofvoterapathy and disenchantment with politics within the context of the continuing means of eu integration, and provides various analytical instruments for interpreting either the emergence of different conceptualizations of citizenship and other kinds of significant civic and political engagement.
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Extra info for Democracy in Transition: Political Participation in the European Union
Example text
Would deduce. And yet it is not based on reason. You need only think of the impulsive decision made by the tennis player who runs up to the net, to understand that it has nothing to do with the learned construction that the coach, after analysis, draws up . . The conditions of rational calculation are practically never given in practice: time is limited, information is restricted. .. (Bourdieu 1990, p. e. calculating, balancing and rebalancing costs and benefits, appears highly disputable. However, the toolbox of the Bourdieun theory is even richer: derived from the Hellenic term “doxa”, Bourdieu defined term to represent deeply internalised societal or field-specific presuppositions that are taken for granted and are not up for negotiation (Bourdieu 1998, 66–7).
The frequent distinction drawn between conventional and unconventional participation is, nevertheless, often contested on pragmatic grounds. As Linssen et al. (2011) comments, the distinction between certain acts as unconventional or conventional remains a controversial issue because some unconventional acts such as petitioning or demonstrating are getting more and more generally accepted and differently conceived in the public sphere as time passes (Dalton 2008; Norris et al. 2005). Thus it would be wrong to classify such acts as participating in demonstrations or signing a petition as modes of unconventional political engagement as they have increasingly become acceptable – and definitely much more widespread across the political spectrum.
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, however, has the advantage of flexibility allowing us to consider individuals as agents who, within the field of civil polity, can dynamically shape their behaviour in light of their “capital” and within specific constraints (see the discussion about “class” in the next section). The leading idea of habituated forms of conduct in the terrain of political participation acknowledges that individuals act as innovative agents within the same field and may well share predispositions and constraints.
