Civic Culture
Civic Culture is regarded by many political scientists as the most important factor for a nation to possess to maintain healthy a democracy. However, while scholars like Robert D. Putnam agree with this assertion, Civic culture is not enough to sustain a healthy democracy in a country, it must be paired with the ‘right’ of the four aspects of civic culture (unbiased media, cross cutting cleavages with memberships, etc.) as well as paired with a dependable economy, I will show this through an examination of cases studies of Italy and Germany.
To help prove this I need to clearly define what civic culture means in this essay. Civic culture in this essay is defined as the level of participation of the population in a country that has associational membership, media engagement, voter turnout and a high number of informed voters. (Fisk, Political Culture) In Putnam’s book “Making Democracy Work” he uses a case study of Italy to prove the importance of civic culture. While examining the associational membership in Italy he found “In Italy’s twenty regions, the density of sports clubs ranges from one club for every 377 resident in Valle d’Aosta and 549 in Trentino-Alto Adige to one club for every 1847 resident in Puglia.” (Putnam, 92). He believes the higher the participation in clubs like this the better. This is because associational clubs like these sports clubs in Italy are places for people to meet others that are from different classes and socioeconomic groups. It is a way for people to see how the policy changes that are voting for may affect others, the friends they may make at these clubs, and see the benefits of them where they may have not had the opportunity to see the benefits of them if they had not joined the...
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..., Robert D. Putnam’s theory that civic culture is enough to sustain democracy is not accurate because situations like the backsliding of Weimar Germany away from democracy can happen even with the presence of a high civic culture. Instead of focusing on improving the numbers of people that a part of associational memberships, read newspapers and other media outlets, the number of people that turnout for national elections and the amount of informed voters there needs to be a focus on improving the quality of Civic Participation. There needs to focus on eliminating polarized cleavages within society and eliminating media bias in favor of bipartisan coverage in order to achieve the ‘right’ civic participation. There also needs to be a stable economy where people are not worried about not being able to feed their families to focus on the issues at stake in the country.
A democracy can not function without people engaging in it by carrying out tasks that include voting. If one does not know much about an activity or group, they are less likely to participate in it, revealing that education on government involvement is exceedingly important. The appeals to logic help the readers understand the necessity of civic learning and how crucial it is to get students to take part in and fully comprehend what a democracy
Civic engagement, overall, is on the decline according to Putnam (informal activities in particular, however, are ones that Americans, on average engage in more often). This decline applies to cities because of certain urban characteristics. The city, because of our division of labour, increases our tendency to drop out of community affairs because of busyness. Also, the city's neighbourhoods do not promote togetherness or a distinct "we" feeling because of a city's sheer population to the point that we actually come to view it as a city of strangers (too many to bother making friends with), unlike in the country where your next neighbour will likely be someone you will feel closer to because of time spent together and having no alternative option to socialize with many other people. Also, electronic entertainment (especially TV watching) gives us less incentive to socialize with our neighbours. In sum, these are just some ways his arguments apply to a city.
Janda, K., Berry, J., Golman, J., & Hula, K. (2009). The Challenge of Democracy: American
Factions, or parties, are described in The Federalist No. 10 as groups of citizens “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest.” According to Madison, these human passions divide the public into competing parties that are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.” These parties often negatively impact the rights of other citizens as they pursue their own specialized goals, but it is “the nature of man” to create them. Thus, in order to protect the rights and voices of the people, a successful government must be committed to the regulation of these various factions. A pure (direct) democracy, argues Madison, cannot effectively do this because it offers every citizen a vote in serious public matters, and economic stratification alone prevents th...
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There are more than 200 languages estimated to be spoken here in California alone (McCaffree 611-613). The reason cultural diversity is a barrier is because of different beliefs other countries and cultures have regarding health care. Another part of this type of barrier is due to language differences. Culture is a huge part of our life and each needs to be treated with respect. The US is one of the most culturally diverse nations in the world so it’s even more important here; California is a very diverse state. Since the 20th century, there has been an increase in immigration into this country from different cultures. Our diversity is part of what defines us as a country. One such example is the Chinese culture that believes in the concept
To achieve civic engagement is undertaken in many diverse ways. These are determined by several factors, amongst them the purpose of the civic engagement, the people involved in it, the funds to be involved amongst others. The...
It is a culture in which private persons (the public) do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers. We are in a moment of time in which an explosion of new media technology has made it very easy for everyday people to take media in their own hands to create, to share, to express themselves, through every possible media channel. Participatory culture could be defined as new ways of life that lead people to create and circulate new self-made content including video, audio, text, and images. The movement is taking shape and being popularized by consumer social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and Wikipedia that encourage mass participation and collaboration. Participatory culture is changing the way people and the media communicate and actively engage. The characteristic that define modern participatory culture is that consumption is no longer the only way we used media like in the past. We have started to expand our focus to include producing and sharing media too which can be found in any form or content. Example would be fan communities, groups of gamers, the blogging population, and various sub cultures online. What these groups have in common is their supportive environments in which to create and share. There is an assumption that anyone who is currently a reader could become a writer, anyone who is a consumer can become a producer. Participatory culture fostered by new media is like a communication triathlon involving consumption, production, and sharing leads to more knowledge. Many of these tools allow us to remix, recirculate, content from media as a mode of creative expression. There is an informal training process for experienced participants help newbies acquire the skills they need to be...
The concept of citizenship traditionally has two meanings: it both implies legal relationships between a person and a country, thus being close to nationality, and defines a normative ideal of the association with a political community and an active participation in it; while analyzing the attributes of ‘a good citizen’, we mostly deal with the latter. Though it is democracy that enables us to fully exploit the capacities of our citizenship by giving us civil, political and social rights, it itself requires responsible citizens for proper functioning of its institutions. However, more and more people these days prefer to abstain from public life and to pursue private interests, and with the growth of passive citizenship, it is worth asking: what does constitute a good citizen? I believe that a good citizen is a person who never makes a choice between private interests and public activities, but the one whose life is balanced between those two, the one who needs to step outside the close circle to fulfill his life-mission, to realize his potential.
Cultural Appropriation versus Multiculturalism In today's society, there are many different cultures that individuals identify with. Culture is very important to many people and is something that helps define who we are. When different cultures are respected and appreciated, it is a beautiful thing, it can bring individuals in society closer to one another. Ideally, this understanding of one another’s cultures can lead to multiculturalism.
Civil society is both a way of describing aspects of modern society and an aspiration, an ideal of what a good society should be like. It has recently been revived to emphasize the capacity of societies to organize themselves through the active cooperation of their members. Unfortunately up to today we still don't have a universally recognised definition and the whole concept is still the core of a intense academic debate. That is why it seemed appropriate, for the purpouse of this paper, to analyse the historical evolution of the concept throughout the centuries.