Series: Civil Society and Social Change
Series Editors: Ian Rees Jones, Cardiff University, Mike Woods, Aberystwyth University and Paul Chaney, Cardiff University
This series provides interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives on the rapidly changing nature of civil society at local, regional, national and global scales.
Civil Society and Social Change
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In analyses of the contemporary electoral landscape, one phenomenon has been garnering increasing attention: protest behaviour and political disengagement. Recent literature has primarily focused on examining these processes through the perspective of voting for populist parties. However, there have been only a few studies that have delved into other forms of protest. The objective of our study is to surpass the limited scope of populist votes and instead concentrate on alternative types of protest behaviour. Specifically, we aim to compare two distinct manifestations of discontent: the Yellow Vest demonstrations and abstentionism. Our viewpoint is that both the Yellow Vest movement and electoral abstentionism are expressions of rejection stemming from the margins. However, they manifest in different ways – violent demonstrations on one hand, and widespread abstentionism on the other. Our goal is to ascertain whether these two behaviours reflect the same patterns of marginalisation and disillusionment, or if they correspond to different territorial dynamics. To achieve this goal, we have conducted an econometric analysis on the scale of French employment zones, utilising socio-economic and spatial data.
This chapter argues that political leaders who practise regressive forms of populism, characterised by authoritarianism and xenophobia, tend to frame ‘the people’ in whose interests they purport to act in narrow terms as citizens of the nation state. Popular concerns are addressed by mobilising a ‘politics of the enemy’, reasserting the power of the nation state against those deemed to be unworthy of access to citizenship. Place is considered as something that must be defended from external threat. Remoteness is thus accentuated both between the place of the nation state and its ‘native’ inhabitants, and the external world, and between political representatives and a plural people that exists outside the narrow boundaries of exclusive populism. Drawing on empirical examples from the UK, this chapter seeks to determine whether a radical democratic approach to citizenship that goes beyond the nation state to focus on local forms of civic participation and deliberation can reframe place as a site of emancipatory politics, thus tackling the root structural and systemic causes of regressive populism. Citizenship that is deliberative, participatory and pluralistic aims to develop democratic praxis from the ground up that is informed by the commoning of knowledge, social goods and identity.
Since the 2010s, populism and illiberal politics have been on the rise. Demagogue leaders preach simplified rhetoric to vilify the powerless, polarising city and rural areas and sparking such shocking events as the US insurrection on 6th January 2021.
This interdisciplinary book argues for a politics of representativity and accountability to help transform people’s experiences, showing that where they live matters and, therefore, so do they.
This book demonstrates how place-based politics can draw on, and benefit from, collective local knowledge, rather than deferring to a nameless central government. Analysing democratic theory and using rich case studies, from protest movements to citizens’ assemblies it shows how it can return a sense of control to the people.
As economic inequality grows, so too does alienation, separation, distrust and political apathy. To seriously address destabilising inequality, we must rewire our economy such that it naturally produces more equitable and sustainable outcomes. Community Wealth Building (CWB) is a way to do that based on shared asset ownership, giving people greater control of the economic activities that affect their daily lives. CWB is a strategy for directly confronting entrenched inequalities of wealth and power, while working to rebuild the fabric of community through inclusion, citizen engagement and direct empowerment. This chapter presents the history, theory and practice of CWB and offers examples from Scotland to Chicago where this approach to economic reconstruction is being applied in ways that begin to shift institutional behaviours and reorder political relationships.
This chapter uses US Populism in the 1890s as a historical case study to examine how farmers, miners and other workers in marginalised places reclaimed place in order to create a ‘cooperative commonwealth’, a new politics of place based on a more just and equitable organisation of US society and territory. Local experiments in civic participation – cooperatives and Farmers’ Alliances – integrated political empowerment into ordinary people’s everyday practices and led to the creation of a new progressive ‘people’s party’, Populism. This chapter also uses the example of Coxey’s Army, an 1894 protest march by unemployed workers converging on Washington, DC, to show how Populism politicised space and how local cooperative experiences translated into a cooperative vision for the nation. Populist mobilisation demonstrates that developing a positive sense of place and grounding reform work in democratic praxis are essential for ordinary people to assert their identity as citizens, matter in local and national political debates, and rebalance asymmetrical power relations with the federal government and corporate interests.
The chapter has a double objective: to analyse – adopting a place-sensitive and path-dependent approach – the diversification of populism in remote and marginalised places of Europe, on the one hand, and the development of local citizenship as civic mobilisations and sense-rich practices on the other, investigating the potential dialectics between populism and these forms of mobilisation. Referring to ongoing processes of ‘remotisation’ in European rural and marginalised regions, the first part studies populism in two temporalities: the longue durée and the short term, combining diachronic and synchronic perspectives. They allow us to distinguish between endogenous or agrarian and imported populism, the former stemming from root causes in agrarian sociocultural conditions, the latter imported to remote places by national populist brokers often coming from urban areas. The second part studies the citizens’ responses. Three types of civic mobilisations are distinguished; the ‘yellow vests’ movement as a mass contestation of people left behind; some xenophobic anti-immigration grass-roots mobilisations, and civil initiatives of solidarity, politics of friendship and local citizenship for dialogical co-creation of living together.
This chapter advocates for inclusive local democracy through a local citizenship status policy granting political participation rights to nationals and non-nationals, as a response to contemporary challenges, marked by exclusionary populism, confronting democracies. Drawing on empirical research, the chapter emphasises engaging all residents, regardless of nationality, in local politics to enhance community cohesion and integration. Exploring practical aspects of local citizenship status implementation, the chapter examines obstacles in granting political rights to non-nationals, conducts a historical analysis of the interplay between nationality and citizenship, and studies legal frameworks and concrete examples. Considering the European Union’s citizenship model, transcending national boundaries, the chapter suggests a more inclusive approach to civic belonging based on residence rather than nationality. Ultimately, the chapter argues that establishing a local citizenship status is the most effective way to grant non-nationals political rights and to implement inclusive local democracy, fostering community cohesion and cultivating a diverse national identity that challenges exclusionary narratives.
Should policies be sensitive to people in places? Why? How? The relevance of these questions goes beyond the issue of how to deal with ‘places left behind’. It is central to the issue of democracy, whether decision making relevant for societies will increasingly be concentrated in a few private and/or public hands, or whether it will be the fruit of a heated, open, informed and reasonable public debate, which is the only chance to improve social and environmental justice. I argue that for the second scenario to be achieved, a radical shift is needed towards a policy method sensitive to people in places. This is the only way to avoid an authoritarian dynamic fuelled by regressive populism and rebuild social ties and society’s trust in, and contribution to, its democratic institutions. Research and a wide range of experiments provide enough information on how to implement such good practice and for it to be adopted at system level. But the adversaries are strong. And we need to improve the way we deal with them.
Populism needs to be understood not as a political pathology, but as the expression of a sense of loss of democratic control. To address this political sentiment, it is necessary to understand such root causes and devise ways in which a sense of democratic involvement can be rebuilt. In this chapter, I address these issues by focusing specifically on climate policies and the green transition, as a decisive terrain in which some of these challenges are being played out. I argue that on the political right climate-sceptic discourse has succeeded in articulating a populist discourse of opposition to the people and to technocracy. I propose that, to counter this discourse, a democratic populist response should focus on a democratic reclaiming of green planning and the connected reconstruction of forms of participation from the most local and immediate level, as a way of giving popular sovereignty a concrete and tangible form.
