Bøker av Stephen Coleman

This book is about what it means to speak of a political mood.

Social conformity surrounds and enmeshes us, but we are seldom aware of its full impact. This book demonstrates just how pervasively social conformity affects society and politics. The impact of conformity on voting behavior and government is a particular focus. When conformity affects voters' choices, it runs contrary to the idea that they are making a rational decision among political parties or candidates the basis of democracy and it can lead to unexpected political consequences. At the extreme, social conformity can hijack democratic government and lead to violence against minority groups or totalitarianism. The impact of conformity is assessed through quantitative and qualitative analyses, a few simple mathematical models, and specific numerical predictions that are verified with historical data from the USA, Germany, Japan, Russia, and many other countries over much of the 20th century. The results give new insights on voting, political party systems, crime, ethnic violence, democratic government, and the nature of society, including both positive and negative consequences of conformity. Building on research in cognitive psychology over the last twenty years, the book also ties conformity and resulting social institutions to certain cognitive processes that go on without a person's conscious awareness.

Relations between the public and holders of political authority are in a period of transformative flux. On the one side, new expectations and meanings of citizenship are being entertained and occasionally acted upon. On the other, an inexorable impoverishment of mainstream political communication is taking place. This book argues that the Internet has the potential to improve public communications and enrich democracy, a project that requires imaginative policy-making. This argument is developed through three stages: first exploring the theoretical foundations for renewing democratic citizenship, then examining practical case studies of e-democracy, and finally, reviewing the limitations of recent policies designed to promote e-democracy and setting out a radical, but practical proposal for an online civic commons: a trusted public space where the dispersed energies, self-articulations and aspirations of citizens can be rehearsed, in public, within a process of ongoing feedback to the various levels and centers of governance: local, national and transnational.