Henrik Bang

‘Yes we can’: identity politics and project politics for a late-modern world

There is widespread agreement in mainstream participation studies that social capital and civic engagement in Western democracies are in steady and continuous decline. How did it happen, then, that Barack Obama was able to mobilize tens of millions of volunteers and supporters for his spectacularly successful and novelty-creating presidential campaign? Part of the answer is that his campaign was directed to building political capital for solving common policy concerns. This marks a creative shift in political communication from being oriented towards keeping government effective and legitimate to getting people freely and actively to accept and help in executing what has to be done in order to solve common concerns. The paper discusses why this shift has not been detected by mainstream participation studies, following their development in Almond and Verbas civic culture, through Putnams social capital framework, to Norriss cause-oriented politics. Later, Marsh et al.s new politics of lived experience is introduced and connected to the project politics model for studying ‘everyday makers and expert citizens’. The conclusion is that Obamas rhetoric in particular appeals to everyday makers and expert citizens, and that their reciprocal resonance opens for a fusion of identity politics and project politics in a new, much more communicative and interactive democratic model for doing what neither neoliberalism nor statism apparently can do: getting things done in prudent manner by establishing more balanced and discursive two-way relations of autonomy and dependence between political authorities and lay people.

Good Governance in Network Society: Reconfiguring the Political from Politics to Policy

This paper critically assesses the implications of the good governance program and its underpinning network approach to public governance—that is, the increased reliance on more or less informal networks as a way to mobilize and engage citizens, firms, and organizations in the development, implementation, and monitoring of public policy. We begin by positioning the network approach to public governance within the broader notion of an emerging network society. Second, we present the claim that, on a systemic level, the result of the network paradigm and good governance as a reorientation of the political system from politics-policy to policy-politics. Third, we highlight the normatively ambiguous nature of the network paradigm and good governance, based on a discussion of the two major critical positions: governmentality studies and critical theory. Finally, we suggest some initial guidelines on how to pursue a theory of ethical political action within the parameters of the network paradigm.

The politics of threats: late-modern politics in the shadow of neoliberalism

In my approach to governance, I have attempted to re-connect modern and late-modern politics by distinguishing democracy from good governance, or politics-policy from policy-politics. In a recent article in Critical Policy Studies, David Marsh provided a sympathetic and relevant criticism of this approach. It is his view that I overrate the impact of late-modern network governance and participation by failing to see that communicative and interactive network politics operates in the dark shadows of hierarchy and bureaucracy on the one hand, and of economic and social class relations on the other hand. I do not, in fact, deny the importance of these. What I am attempting to illuminate, however, is how the neoliberal form of modern democratic government is in the process of undermining its own legitimacy and effectiveness due to the casting of these dark shadows on the whole of everyday life. Neoliberalism is reducing itself to a modern rational interest politics, replacing its moral and ideological appeals to legality and legitimacy with a contract-politics that is, in contrast, based on brusque commands and threats. In leaning more and more heavily on the principal–agent model for governing those institutions and networks that are in charge of actual delivery, however, neoliberalism is undermining the very transformative capacities on which it depends for reaching its policy goals. Everyday institutions and networks simply cannot do all that has to be done to improve the welfare and wellbeing of the population if these institutions and networks are subordinated to a coercive, hierarchical authority draining them of their communicative and interactive powers. With its politics of threats, neoliberalism likewise creates a hatred of ‘big’ politics in the population. This negative attitude threatens democracys continued existence because it makes popular support solely dependent on peoples fear of the consequences of non-compliance and their positive assessment of the systems ability to deliver. There is a substantial need for a new critical-political response to neoliberalism, one that begins with the assumption that politics need not be hierarchical and coercive in order to get things done in a wise and effective manner.

Occupy Wall Street: A New Political Form of Movement and Community?

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the political form of Occupy Wall Street on Twitter. Drawing on evidence contained within the profiles of over 50,000 Twitter users, political identities of participants are characterized using natural language processing. The results find evidence of a traditional oppositional social movement alongside a legitimizing countermovement, but also a new notion of political community as an ensemble of discursive practices that are endogenous to the constitution of political regimes from the “inside out.” These new political identities are bound by thin ties of political solidarity linked to the transformative capacities of the movement rather than thick ties of social solidarity.

‘We the People’ versus ‘We the Heads of States’: the debate on the democratic deficit of the European Union

The Eurozone crisis has rekindled the debate on the democratic deficit of the European Union (EU). In this paper, the debate is reconsidered by contrasting the modus vivendi of ‘We the People’ in the USA with the modus vivendi of ‘We the Heads of States’ in the EU. It is demonstrated that many of the solutions to the alleged democratic deficit focus on how more voice can be given to ‘We the People’ on the input side, but that this goes against the functional logic of the EU system, thereby undermining its ability to govern. Instead, we argue that more attention should be given to how to increase output legitimacy, and a number of proposals are put forward. Such a reshuffling of the analytical focus is the best way forward to escape the current impasse in the debate on how to ‘fix’ democracy in the EU.

Digitally networked movements as problematization and politicization

ABSTRACT This paper develops the concepts of politicization and problematization using two case studies from Spain. Politicization involves the process of interest articulation and demands for identity recognition whereas problematization concerns placing into question and taking action with respect to otherwise naturalized aspects of politics and society. These concepts are studied in the context of a demonstration by the Indignados as well as a general strike in Spain. The data analysis involves the collection and analysis of tweets produced in relation to both demonstrations using natural language processing. The results indicate a higher degree of calls for problematization during the Indiginados protest whereas there is more evidence of politicization during the general strike. These communications suggest that each movement engages politics on different terms with the Indignados embracing more of a problematization discourse centred on taking action and operating from within the political system whereas the unions have engaged in more of a politicization discourse aimed at petitioning political elites from outsize the political system and eschewing political action themselves.

Foucault's Political Challenge

If one reads Michel Foucault backward, so to speak, one can sense the contours of a big narrative of the political which is founded on the claim that Where there is obedience there cannot be parrhesia (Foucault, 2011, p. 336). What Foucault is doing with this sentence is breaking the circle between representation of the multitude and obedience as the political means of creating unity. He is no longer just problematizing how We the People and its free individuals are constructed in, and through, the exercise of disciplinary subjection. He is moving into a recoding enterprise, starting from showing how obedience is incompatible with a politics of truth. The unity created by centralized domination, he holds, is democratically false, however legitimate it may be. There can be no real democracy where laypeople are commanded to hand over their capacity and right to govern themselves to a sovereign authority. This political claim runs like a red thread through Foucaults texts, providing his formal, strategic, and tactical analyses with the minimal degree of coherence required to form a great narrative about acceptance and recognition of political authority as prior to the generation of conflict and consensus. Modernity has not only failed to decapitate the absolutist king, Foucault argues; it also keeps democracy imprisoned in a circulating rulers/ruled opposition. The kings legitimate domination must be problematized and recoded as a new, more positive, creative and facilitative political authority relationship inherently open to self- and co-governance from below. This is what Foucaults political challenge is about.

Contentious connective action: a new kind of life-political association for problematizing how expert systems operate

ABSTRACT Neoliberalism and populism both challenge the idea that democratic politics is of and by ‘the people.’ Neoliberalism suggests technocracy as the way ahead for nudging laypeople to do the right things. Populism appeals to the morality of an exceptional leader required for tumbling ‘the system’ and make the home of ‘We the People’ whole again. Both positions consider laypeople like clay to be formed in their own image. The logic of contentious connective action is a direct response to this political degradation of the layactor. Without laypeople being able chronically to problematize how things are done by expert systems, there can be no real democracy. Hence, it is about time we bring the lifeworld with its capable and knowledgeable laypeople back into the fold. Technological development has made it possible for the lifeworld to attain global and not just local significance. Its spontaneous activities in local time-space can now connect globally, enabling worldwide demonstrations in the name of ‘we the 99%.’

Governmentality and the Political (System)

In her commentary on our article “Good Governance in Network Society: Reconfiguring the Political from Politics to Policy” (Bang & Esmark, 2009), Kersty Hobson argues that we present a limited view of governmentality research, “thus closing off (potential and actual) fruitful avenues of inquiry into how network governance functions, in what ways, and to what ends.” In a way, she is quite right. In our attempt to grasp the implications of the emerging network society and its program of good governance, we utilize a number of conceptual tools from various toolboxes, governmentality studies only being one of these. Hobson’s intervention is thus a very timely one, and we welcome the opportunity to elaborate on this particular dimension of our argument, if only in relatively brief fashion. Our response picks up on what we perceive to be the two interrelated propositions put forward by Hobson: (1) the real potential of governmentality studies comes out in microanalysis of power dynamics, and (2) the major strength of governmentality is to identify, and perhaps even facilitate, resistance from below and outside toward political strategies and instruments deployed from above and inside the political system. Both propositions are summarized by Hobson when she, using McKee’s phrasing, argues for the benefits of a realist governmentality approach by stating that it illuminates “a potential disjuncture between top-down, universalistic plans and empirical reality at the microlevel.” Turning to the interpretation of governmentality studies as a microlevel approach first, we certainly do not wish to deny the potential benefits of analyzing the implications of network governance or other strategies and instruments of government at the microlevel. As it is, however, our article pursues a macrolevel approach: Our argument concerns developments on the level of society and on the level of the political system, which we, in the tradition of political systems theory, conceive as a spatially and temporally inclusive, yet communicatively exclusive, subsystem of society (Esmark, 2009). So what are we to make of this difference between utilizing governmentality studies as a macrosociological and macropolitical approach vis-à-vis a microlevel ap-

Populism: a major threat to democracy?

ABSTRACT Unsurprisingly, given the surge in support for “populist” movements across the globe, there has been a resurgence of academic interest in the subject. Our aim in this volume is to explore some of the key issues in these contemporary debates. In this introduction, we focus upon five of the main questions raised in this literature: What is populism? What variants of it are there? How serious a problem is the rise of populism? Why has there been a rise in populism? And how can populism be addressed?