1,721,010 research outputs found
Social Media and Democracy
No full textThis book is a state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the impact of digital technology on democracy. It will interest scholars, policymakers, and philanthropic organizations. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core
Recommended from our members
The Promise and Pitfalls of the New Voting Rights Act
Full text linkIn the summer of 2006, Congress reauthorized the expiring provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) with a unanimous vote in the Senate and with limited opposition in the House of Representatives. The veneer of bipartisanship that outsiders perceived in the final vote glossed over serious disagreements between the parties over the meaning of the central provision of the new VRA, which prohibits voting laws that "diminish the ability" of minority citizens "to elect their preferred candidates of choice." Those disagreements came to the surface in a fractured Senate Committee Report released only after Congress had passed the law. This Article describes the unprecedented legislative history of this law, and the political and constitutional constraints that led the law to take the form that it did. It also presents an interpretation of the new retrogression standard that avoids the partisan bias of alternatives while emphasizing the importance of racially polarized voting to the constitutionality and meaning of this new law. It urges that the new law be read as preventing redistricting plans that reduce the aggregated probability across districts of the election of candidates preferred by the minority community and disfavored by whites
Fig Leaves and Tea Leaves in the Supreme Court’s Recent Election Law Decisions
Full text linkIn the field of American election law, political developments and the Supreme Court's docket often progress along parallel tracks. Those tracks rarely intersect with such salience and notoriety as in the 2000 election controversy. More often, the issues the Supreme Court decides have immediate thematic relevance to the ongoing campaign, even when the Court is not actually deciding a case that grows out of the campaign itself. Such was the case with the Supreme Court's election law docket from the 2007-2008 term and the historic 2008 election. The five election law cases the Court decided hinted at ongoing controversies with incarnations in the 2008 campaign
Democratic creative destruction? The effect of a changing media landscape on democracy
Full text linkThe move to a more digital, more mobile, and more platform-dominated media environment represents a change to the institutions and infrastructures of free expression and a form of “democratic creative destruction” that challenges incumbent institutions, creates new ones, and in many ways empowers individual citizens, even as this change also leaves both individuals and institutions increasingly dependent on a few large US-based technology companies and subjects many historically disadvantaged groups to more abuse and harassment online. This chapter aims to step away from assessing the democratic implications of the internet on the basis of individual cases, countries, or outcomes, but rather to focus on how structural changes in the media are intertwined with changes in democratic politics
Social Media and Democracy
Get PDFThis book is a state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the impact of digital technology on democracy. It will interest scholars, policymakers, and philanthropic organizations. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core
Suing the Government in Hopes of Controlling It: The Evolving Justifications for Judicial Involvement in Politics
Full text link
Strict in Theory, Loopy in Fact
Full text linkMost Supreme Court-watchers find the decision in LULAC v. Perry notable for the ground it breaks concerning Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the ground it refuses to break on the topic of partisan gerrymandering. I tend to think the Court’s patchwork application of Section 2 to strike down a district on vote dilution grounds is not all that dramatic, nor is its resolution of the partisan gerrymandering claims all that surprising. The truly unprecedented development in the case for me was Justice Scalia’s vote to uphold what he considered a racial classification under the Equal Protection Clause, but one that survived strict scrutiny. This essay tries to explain why his opinion is important, both in its own right and with respect to its implications for how he might consider the upcoming challenges to the newly reauthorized Voting Rights Act
- …
