Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 99 p. : ill., map. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-96).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in Environmental Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 290-308). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR19805

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Iowa, 2007. / Supervisor: Alfonso J. Damico. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 284-299).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: John P. Portelli.

This thesis attempts to answer the question ‘What e-democracy strategy, if any, is most suitable for Bahrain?’. Based on a qualitative case study for the country, an e-Democracy strategy is synthesised and presented in this thesis. The literature review includes the forms, ideals and values of democracy. The researcher supports and argues for the assertion that any attempt to implement e-Democracy must not undermine the basic values and ideals of democracy. In the review on Islam and democracy, the author argues that Islam is not against democracy. However it is asserted that e-Democracy implementation must consider the cultural and religious context of Bahrain. The process of democratisation and how it is taking place in Bahrain and Gulf countries are also discussed. A strategy formulation framework is adopted after reviewing literature on how to formulate a strategy. E-Government strategies of reading players in the e-Government are reviewed with an objective of learning lessons prior to formulating e-Democracy strategy. The literature review on e-democracy helped to understand the theory and practice of e-Democracy elsewhere in the world and identify issues that required further investigation. The issues identified from the literature were investigated using empirical data. Data from multiple sources were collected and analysed. The methods included interviews, focus groups and analysis of documents. The results confirm that most of the issues identified as part of the literature review are relevant to the case under investigation. However, there were issues that were not present in the literature. This includes the need to consider democracy’s human, social and cultural aspects as well as factors pertaining to the political divide in Bahrain. This, if not tackled properly, may pose some challenges to the implementation of e-Democracy. The results also disprove the assumption held by the government of Bahrain, as well as by the researcher at the beginning of the study, that e-voting is a more plausible type of e-democracy than other forms. The author adapts and presents an e-Democracy model for Bahrain based on Chadwick and May (2003) along with the e-Democracy strategy for Bahrain. The author also argues that the model and the strategy can be tailored to use in other GCC countries. The study fills a gap in the literature, namely the lack of e-democracy studies pertaining to the Middle East. It also provides a framework and lessons for other countries in the region for the creation of an e-democracy strategy.

As social media platforms and the internet have become an integral part of our civic and political lives, many questions about how to approach digital politics and civic engagement have emerged in the past few years. This project attempts to address some of those questions, specifically how we may think about civic education in the digital age. I begin with the premise that in the digital age, education for democracy must focus on its epistemic aspect. While proponents of aggregative forms of democracy consider vote to be the main form of citizen participation, forms of epistemic democracy such as deliberative democracy seek to contribute to social knowledge through communication amongst citizens, civil society, market players and state institutions. I initially ground my inquiry within the American context by highlighting the participatory character of the American democratic ethos. For this, I evoke John Dewey’s view of democracy as involving collective inquiry that allows both individual growth and the enrichment of collective life. Then, by examining Jürgen Habermas’ deliberative and Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic models of democracy against the backdrop of increasing digital mediation of civic and political discourse, I problematize democratic subjectivity in the digital age and suggest using Etienne Balibar’s notion of transindividuality, which he develops from 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. While Habermas demonstrates that certain communication conditions are necessary for legitimate political action, Mouffe reminds us that taking into account the importance of collective affective drives can help us take seriously the plurality of our contemporary democracies. However, I argue that in the digital age the strengths of these two approaches must be adapted to the evolving materiality of the environment in which people’s lived experience takes place rather than merely kept for instances of communication that occur within state institutions. For this, Balibar’s suggestion to think of the process of freedom of speech as a public good allows us to ground discourse in the material context in which it is produced and maintained, and provides a generative way of thinking of the role of education in our times.

This dissertation investigates the question: what do we want from our democratic institutions and how should we design them to get it? I argue that we want our democratic institutions to promote cognitive political engagement among all citizens and that accomplishing this task requires focusing reform efforts on electoral institutions like mandatory voting rather than small-scale deliberative forums. Democratic theory has been dominated by deliberative theories of democracy for at least two decades. As this literature turned to the question of how to institutionalize deliberative democracy, the inherently limited scale of deliberative institutions like deliberative polling or participatory budgeting has made scholars like Simone Chambers and Jane Mansbridge worry that deliberation abandons mass democracy, and with it meaningful democratic legitimacy. I argue that such worries are well founded because the effective inclusion of all citizens, not deliberation, constitutes the most important democratic value and that as a result, participatory institutions should be arranged so as to promote inclusion, even at the cost of values like deliberation. The first part of the project advances a novel conception of inclusion based on reflective cognitive engagement with democratic politics and demonstrates the central importance of inclusion within democratic theory. The second half of the project examines different institutions for their ability to promote inclusion and finds that, in the American context, most deliberative forums as currently designed are too small and feeble to do so but that adequately reformed electoral institutions like mandatory voting can promote inclusion and reflection well. One important implication is that in a world of limited activist resources and public taste for reform, democratic reformers in the United States should focus their attention on electoral organization and institutions rather than small-scale experiments if they hope to affect mass democracy. This project sits at the nexus of empirical research on political participation, comparative institutional design, and the ethics of democratic citizenship. It considers questions like: when the resources of democratic reformers are finite, what is the most important goal for them to pursue? How demanding of the time, attention, and resources of its citizens must a flourishing democracy be? May citizens opt out of such demands? What specific reforms are most efficient at achieving the proper priorities of democratic theory? Answering these questions requires combining empirical insights about political behavior and the performance of different institutional arrangements with normative and ethical arguments regarding the priorities of democratic theory and the nature of democratic citizenship.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 339-342) Also available in print.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-07T15:08:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 1780699 bytes, checksum: a2df5be5e8d9bec3a90b0a0ca2a0291b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-12-19 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The focus of our study is the Education Management Modernization Program of the Government of Pernambuco, in the period 2007 to 2010.The study gives special attention to the assessment of the policies and the design of the democratic management mechanisms established by the .program. The research question was : Is the: PMG / ME seen as an educational policy that contributes for strengthening or weakening the democratic management of education in Pernambuco? Our overall objective was to analyze the process by which the democratic school management strategies were established in the above period. Considering this major objective, other specific aspects of the program were analyzed such as :( i) the implementation process of the PMG / ME and its impact on school management strategies in the stateoperated schools ; ( ii) the identification of actions of the PMG / ME that aimed at establishing democratic management of education; and (iii) the assessment of how the PMG / ME could contributed to strengthening or weakening the democratic management of education in the state. The study used a qualitative methodology supported by questionnaires for data collection. The following categories of analysis were selected: State, Democracy and Public Policy. The State is understood as the establishment of relationships of power within the society Foucault (1979). Public Policies are ¨ the State in action¨ as defined by Melo on (2002) following Jobert & Muller (1989). The concept of democracy implies the control exercised by the society and the division of power. Following the concepts mentioned before, participatory democracy leads to actions of the State and the society by the exercise of their micropowers as advocated by Foucault, and consequently the participatory democracy establishes forms of power and resistance. Power can be established/re-established by the State or society. The one who has the power can counteract through resistance. The research was supported by strong national and international literature, including contributions from Foucault (1979, 1987, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2008) and Bakhtin (2000, 2002). In addition, the methodology of qualitative/documentary research (Ludke and Andre, 1986) was used to analyze the process of democratic construction im PMG/ME. The implementation of the PMG/ME was characterized by continuity of government policies, initially adopted under the Administrative Reform of the State in 1995 and subsequently developed in the Administration os Eduardo Campos (2007 to 2010). This Administration intended to strengthen the State management through the PNAGE/PE. This study concluded that the actions developed by the PMG/ME have no impact in the development of democratic management in the state-operated schools because there were no specific mechanisms or instruments to strength the exercise of this type of management at the school level. / O nosso objeto de investigação é o Programa de Modernização da Gestão na Educação do Governo de Pernambuco, no período de 2007 a 2010, com recorte nas diretrizes de políticas educacionais estabelecidas neste Programa, na concepção de gestão democrática que ele anuncia. Nossa questão de investigação: O PMG/ME pode ser visto como um programa de política educacional, que contribui para o fortalecimento ou para o enfraquecimento da gestão democrática da educação em Pernambuco? Nosso objetivo geral é analisar o processo de construção democrática no PMG/ME, no período acima referido. Desse objetivo, decorrem outros específicos, que aqui delimitamos: I) Analisar o processo de implementação do PMG/ME e sua repercussão na gestão democrática das escolas da rede estadual; II) Identificar quais ações do PMG/ME são direcionadas para a gestão democrática da educação; e III) Avaliar quais ações do PMG/ME contribuíram para o fortalecimento ou o enfraquecimento da gestão democrática da educação do estado. A metodologia utilizada foi desenvolvida na perspectiva qualitativa e documental como instrumento de coleta de dados. As categorias de análise tomadas para análise da pesquisa são: Estado, Políticas Públicas e Democracia. O Estado sendo entendido, conforme Foucault (1979), a partir das relações de poder estabelecidas no corpo social. Políticas Públicas entendidas como conceituadas por Melo (2002) a partir de Jobert& Muller (1989) seriam o Estado em ação . O conceito de Democracia é entendido por nós como soberania popular, divisão de poder. No entendimento das categorias supracitadas, a democracia participativa leva à ação do Estado e do corpo social, exercendo seus micropoderes defendidos em Foucault e estabelecem formas de poder e resistência. Assim, o poder pode ser restabelecido pelo Estado ou pela sociedade. Aquele que o exerce se contraporá a partir da resistência. Desenvolvemos a pesquisa sob a perspectiva das contribuições teóricas de; Foucault (1979; 1987; 2000; 2001; 2003; 2004; 2006; 2008) e Bakhtin (2000; 2002). Utilizando a metodologia da pesquisa documental numa perspectiva qualitativa (Ludke e André, 1986),conseguimos atingir nosso objetivo neste trabalho de análise do processo de construção democrática no PMG/ME. A implementação do PMG/ME se deu por continuidade de política governamental, no âmbito das ações que foram adotadas no âmbito da Reforma Administrativa do Estado em 1995 e continuaram sendo desenvolvidas no Governo Eduardo Campos com práticas ao fortalecimento do Estado gerencial em adesão ao PNAGE, adotado por meio do PNAGE/PE. Não houve repercussão dessas ações na gestão democrática das escolas da rede estadual, porque não houve ações que viessem a fortalecê-las.

Research into the citizen political participation via social media is dominated by two grand narratives. In the first, new media are seen as empowering society, while the second portrays the Internet as the State’s ultimate tool for manipulating citizens. This research employed content analysis, critical discourse analysis and interview to compare and contrast the nature of political participation and deliberation on Weibo in [Hong Kong and mainland] and by [VIPs and causal users] on 2012 Hong Kong Chief Executive Election, and how the online censorship shaped their political participation and deliberation regarding this case. Mixed methods used with theoretical framework (e.g. democracy, digital democracy, deliberative democracy, e-participation and citizenship) in this research has demonstrated the role of Weibo both ‘tool’ ‘forum’ and ‘object’ to understand deliberative democracy while citizens used for political participation and deliberation. Dynamic forms of self-censorship demonstrated how the online censorship shaped the citizens’ political participation and deliberation through dynamic explicit or implicit ways on Weibo in this case.