Democracy is a system of government in which state power is vested in the people or the general population of a state. Under a minimalist definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitive elections while more expansive definitions link democracy to guarantees of civil liberties and human rights in addition to competitive elections.
An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office.
Deliberative democracy or discursive democracy is a form of democracy in which deliberation is central to decision-making. Deliberative democracy seeks quality over quantity by limiting decision-makers to a smaller but more representative sample of the population that is given the time and resources to focus on one issue.
Walter Lippmann was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of the Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, as well as critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 Public Opinion.
Public opinion, or popular opinion, is the collective opinion on a specific topic or voting intention relevant to society. It is the people's views on matters affecting them.
The tyranny of the majority is an inherent weakness to majority rule in which the majority of an electorate pursues exclusively its own objectives at the expense of those of the minority factions. This results in oppression of minority groups comparable to that of a tyrant or despot, argued John Stuart Mill in his 1859 book On Liberty.
Agenda-setting theory suggests that the communications media, through their ability to identify and publicize issues, play a pivotal role in shaping the problems that attract attention from governments and international organizations, and direct public opinion towards specific issues. The theory suggests that the media can shape public opinion by determining what issues are given the most attention, and has been widely studied and applied to various forms of media. The way news stories and topics that impact public opinion are presented is influenced by the media. It is predicated on the idea that most individuals only have access to one source of information on most issues: the news media. Since they establish the agenda, they may affect how important some things are seen to be.
Public Opinion is a book by Walter Lippmann published in 1922. It is a critical assessment of functional democratic government, especially of the irrational and often self-serving social perceptions that influence individual behavior and prevent optimal societal cohesion. The detailed descriptions of the cognitive limitations people face in comprehending their sociopolitical and cultural environments, leading them to apply an evolving catalogue of general stereotypes to a complex reality, rendered Public Opinion a seminal text in the fields of media studies, political science, and social psychology.
Media democracy is a democratic approach to media studies that advocates for the reform of mass media to strengthen public service broadcasting and develop participation in alternative media and citizen journalism in order to create a mass media system that informs and empowers all members of society and enhances democratic values.
Open-source governance is a political philosophy which advocates the application of the philosophies of the open-source and open-content movements to democratic principles to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy, as with a wiki document. Legislation is democratically opened to the general citizenry, employing their collective wisdom to benefit the decision-making process and improve democracy.
Civic journalism is the idea of integrating journalism into the democratic process. The media not only informs the public, but it also works towards engaging citizens and creating public debate. The civic journalism movement is an attempt to abandon the notion that journalists and their audiences are spectators in political and social processes. In its place, the civic journalism movement seeks to treat readers and community members as participants.
Social disruption is a term used in sociology to describe the alteration, dysfunction or breakdown of social life, often in a community setting. Social disruption implies a radical transformation, in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging. Social disruption might be caused through natural disasters, massive human displacements, rapid economic, technological and demographic change but also due to controversial policy-making.
Democratic media is a form of media organization that strives to have the principles of democracy underlying not only the production of content, but also the organization of the entire project. Civic media is another term with similar concept and therefore can be used interchangeably in many contexts. The mission of the defunct Center for Civic Media of MIT is to design, create, deploy, and assess tools and processes that support and foster civic participation and the flow of information between and within communities, working at the intersection of participatory media and civic engagement.
The Public and Its Problems is a 1927 book by American philosopher John Dewey. In his first major work on political philosophy, Dewey explores the viability and creation of a genuinely democratic society in the face of the major technological and social changes of the 20th century, and seeks to better define what both the 'public' and the 'state' constitute, how they are created, and their major weaknesses in understanding and propagating their own interests and the public good. Dewey rejects a then-popular notion of political technocracy as an alternative system of governing an increasingly complex society, but rather sees democracy as the most viable and sustainable means to achieving the public interest, albeit a flawed and routinely subverted one. He contends that democracy is an ethos and an ongoing project that requires constant public vigilance and engagement to be effective, rather than merely a set of institutional arrangements, an argument he would later expand upon most influentially in his essay "Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us". The Public and its Problems is a major contribution on pragmatism in political philosophy and continued to promote discussion and debate long after its publication.
Liberal democracy, western-style democracy, or substantive democracy is a form of government that combines the organization of a representative democracy with ideas of liberal political philosophy.
Classical pluralism is the view that politics and decision-making are located mostly in the framework of government but that many non-governmental groups use their resources to exert influence. The central question for classical pluralism is how power and influence are distributed in a political process. Groups of individuals try to maximize their interests. Lines of conflict are multiple and shifting as power is a continuous bargaining process between competing groups. There may be inequalities but they tend to be distributed and evened out by the various forms and distributions of resources throughout a population. Any change under this view will be slow and incremental, as groups have different interests and may act as "veto groups" to destroy legislation. The existence of diverse and competing interests is the basis for a democratic equilibrium, and is crucial for the obtaining of goals by individuals.
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest is the second book by American journalist and political thinker Walter Lippmann. Published in the Fall of 1914, Drift and Mastery argues that rational scientific governing can overcome forces of societal drift. Lippmann argued that due to the profound social and economic change old ideas and institutions lacked relevance. Specifically, Drift and Mastery warns against a reliance on broad theories and the framework of competition and self-interest. Democracy and society at large, he argued, was unable to address problems because it was adrift, lacking intentionality and discipline. Lippmann's prescription in Drift and Mastery was deliberate and scientific governing, what he termed mastery. This forward-looking progressive vision sought a better society through rational, scientific order, while rejecting Marxist, Utopian and traditionalist thinking. Drift and Mastery received enormously positive reviews, establishing Lippmann as an important public intellectual and figure within the progressive movement. Although Lippmann later lost faith in the promise of science and rationality in government, Drift and Mastery was and is regarded as an important document of the progressive movement.
Criticism of democracy, or debate on democracy and the different aspects of how to implement democracy best have been widely discussed. There are both internal critics and external ones who reject the values promoted by constitutional democracy.
Types of democracy refers to the various governance structures that embody the principles of democracy in some way. Democracy is frequently applied to governments, but may also be applied to other constructs like workplaces, families, community associations, and so forth.
Media reform refers to proposed attempts to reform mass media towards an agenda which is more in tune with public needs and away from a perceived bias toward corporate, government or political biases. Media reform advocates also place a strong emphasis upon enabling those who are marginalized or semi-marginalized by their individual incomes, immutable characteristics or desperate conditions to possess access to means of publication and dissemination of information. They do not come from a concern with policy, or with a desire to democratize federal bureaucracies and regulations.
