Sustaining Democracy

Democratic spaces must also be durable. Durable spaces facilitate our attachments to our communities and to other members; they help us sustain communities. Chapter 3 draws from Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on democracy to explain how the durability of the built environment can be a powerful resource for generating the attachments that sustain democratic communities by (1) continually reminding citizens of their social obligations and (2) facilitating repeated interactions between citizens. The chapter then turns to the example of Twitter—particularly the mechanism of hashtags—to explore these dynamics in a digital environment. Hashtags provide temporary boundaries that are useful for mobilizing, but not sustaining, communities of interest; as a result, Twitter is not a platform well suited for cultivating the attachments required for longer-term cooperative activity. The chapter concludes with suggestions as to how we might design more durable spaces—and sustainable communities—in digital environments.

Democracy for Profit?

This chapter evaluates Facebook and Twitter’s algorithms using the framework of democratic space. Prominent critiques highlight their opacity and users’ lack of control; tools like Gobo “fix” these algorithms by increasing their flexibility. But while these solutions might cede more control to individual users, they are insufficient for building democratic communities; the more pressing concern for both Facebook and Twitter is their lack of clear boundaries, which undermines users’ ability to recognize their communities. The chapter concludes by showing how we might “democratize” these algorithms in ways that not only increase user control over their digital environments and the algorithms that structure them, but also help to generate and sustain the communities required to exert that control democratically. Ultimately, the chapter argues that questions of ownership and control must be placed alongside considerations about the communal effects of algorithmic design if we are to build environments supportive of democratic politics.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Boundaries are the first necessary characteristic of democratic spaces. Boundaries facilitate the democratic affordance of recognition; they help communities to form. This chapter outlines the role of boundaries in constituting democratic communities by drawing on Aristotle’s concept of “political friendship.” In clearly bounded spaces, citizens are more likely to recognize their common interests and interlocutors—the things they share and the people they share them with. Boundaries thus help generate ties of political friendship. With this function of boundaries in mind, the chapter turns to the example of Facebook to explain how boundaries can operate in digital environments. It shows how design choices made by Facebook—notably, the dissolution of the boundaries imposed by the early .edu requirement and the more recent turn to reimpose boundaries with Facebook Groups—have clear consequences for the likelihood that Facebook users can develop political friendships with one another, thereby forming communities on the platform.

‘It is unbelievable how many come to us’:

In advanced, digitalized democratic communities the demands for literacy are a prerequisite for engagement and inclusion, at the same time different forms of divides are omnipresent. By providing access and qualified support to all citizens, public libraries play a central function in the building of democratic and inclusive local communities, being increasingly relied upon by governments to deliver access and support for e-services. Based on a case study of community library services in Sweden, Östergötland, this paper aims to study digital inclusion as reflected in daily practices through the perspective of librarians. In this paper we argue that while advancing digitalisation involves opening of new access and engagement opportunities through empowering digital tools and Internet, it also involves different challenges of exclusion for those who cannot use, choose not to use or have other needs

Communities of Disagreement

This guest column in Common Knowledge presents the concept of “communities of disagreement” to an international and interdisciplinary audience, perhaps for the first time. It takes as its starting point the contrast between agonistic and deliberative democratic theories, and it attempts to outline how democratic groups may live well with unresolved disagreement yet not give on up developing truth-sensitive decision-making processes. It argues against the widespread idea that shared values are the social glue of democratic communities. By developing arguments of Manfred Frank, the article outlines a model of the relationship between social context, interpretation, and information.

Ideology, Institutions, Power, and Militarized Disputes

This chapter examines if and how intergovernmental organization (IGO) memberships shape participation in militarized interstate disputes. Theorists have argued that IGOs solve informational problems, socialize states, or constitute democratic communities that prevent a resort to violence. The distributive ideological approach suggests that IGOs institutionalize ideologically cohesive coalitions that ameliorate conflicts with insiders but can exacerbate conflict with outsiders. The effect of IGOs on militarized disputes should be present only if the distributional stakes have global ideological implications as opposed to when disputes are purely over particularistic stakes, such as territory. Regression analyses support this insight. Both ideological differences and IGO membership patterns affect dispute participation in dyads that include a major power but not among neighboring states or states involved in a territorial dispute. One implication is that IGO memberships affect the distribution of militarized disputes, but it is unclear whether IGOs in the aggregate reduce militarized conflict.