College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item Work Under Democracy: Labor, Gender and Arendtian Citizenship(2013) Staudinger, Alison Kathryn; Elkin, Stephen; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the interest of promoting a co-constitutive theory of democratic citizenship, this dissertation explores three questions. I ask how work is defined and how this definition creates a hierarchy of types of work, which then leads to my second question, which is how definitions of work or what is not work are carried over into the public space of poli- tics and citizenship, such that even legal citizens may be marginalized by the type of work that they do. I first critique democratic theory, particularly as centered on the idea of the public sphere, for failing to think about work, especially the labor that is required to build these political spaces. I then show how the contemporary economy challenges the ability of citizens to engage in political work because it produces conditions of pre- carious labor, ubiquitous work, the depoliticization of work itself, and incompatibility of wage labor and family life. I use two historical case studies to explore how groups have claimed collective rights housed in the substantive needs of communities when asserting the validity of their work for citizenship. I look to the Articles of Confederation and Daniel Shays for an example focused on waged labor, and then the temperance and Anti-temperance movements for a consideration of gendered reproductive labor. I then address my third question, which is whether it is possible to promote the political work of co-constituting a shared public world without also denigrating the labor, particularly care labor, that is supportive of this project. I claim it is possible, with the aid of Hannah Arendt's understanding of the complex interrelations between action, work and labor and locating of citizenship in the work of world building. I argue for the support of this conception of work and agnostic institutionalism, despite the challenges of the contemporary economy, by advocating for a coalition-based democratic politics aimed at supporting the compatibility of work and family for people who do all sorts of work.Item Official Secrecy: Self, State and Society(2004-07-12) Ellington, Thomas Coke; Barber, Benjamin R; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In meeting the threat posed by terrorism, the democratic state also faces a paradox: Those practices best suited to defending the state are often least suited to democracy. Such is the case with official secrecy, which has received renewed attention. Military and intelligence operations frequently depend on secrecy for their success. At the same time, democracy depends on openness, a fact too often neglected by democratic theory. Democratic theory presumes that citizens are at least minimally capable of making decisions to steer the ship of state, a presumption that requires citizens not only to have the skills necessary to make political decisions but to have the information necessary to make those decisions competently. However, in many areas of the most vital public interest (e.g. foreign policy, nuclear weapons, decisions regarding war and peace), the state intentionally conceals information from citizens. While other factors, such as high information costs, may work against an informed citizenry, official secrecy is qualitatively different and uniquely damaging to democratic governance, even granting that in some instances it may be a necessary evil. Official secrecy subverts the very democratic values it is frequently designed to protect, denying citizen competence, reducing accountability and diminishing the legitimacy of the state, as well as distorting the historical record and creating fertile ground for paranoid-style thinking. Democratic theorists have not been unaware of the importance of information to democratic citizenship. Indeed awareness has promoted the defense of the institutions of free expression as the best means for ensuring that necessary political information is accessible. However, that is no longer enough, as the last century has seen states become producers and repositories of information on a never-before-seen scale. The task for democratic theory now is to recognize this change in the information environment and recognize the importance of this new locus of political information. Understanding and minimizing the impact of official secrecy is a necessary part of this process.