Do you think social movements are goods for democracy? If yes, how?
Answers
Answer:
US President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration on Friday marked an outstanding shift in democratic politics around the world (as my colleague Adina Trunk wrote in her piece on ‘The Dismantling of Democracy’). But Saturday was also noteworthy. More than 500,000 people attended the ‘Women’s March’ in Washington, DC in an effort to create a political counterweight to the election’s rhetoric around diversity, civil liberties and marginalized groups. The march was part of a discussion about the role that social movements will have in the way we do politics in the coming years. Barack Obama’s compelling farewell speech is the most recent wakeup call: ‘if something needs fixing, then lace up your shoes and do some organizing’.
Social movements are often issue-based collections of individuals. Sometimes they take their voices to the streets espousing particular political ideals and, at times, influencing policy from the outside, without being democratically elected. Thus, social movements can put in check democratically elected political leaders with populist and demagogical tendencies that may, in the long run, not provide realistic and sustainable policy alternatives.
Social movements and new communication technologies
Social movements are shaping modern democratic political life. The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and related ‘Occupy’ movements are good examples. Propelled by a blog post in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the movements soon became a media sensation and later disseminated to other regional hubs. In the United States, many of the original protesters eventually supported Bernie Sanders’s 2016 surprisingly successful presidential bid.
The demand for alternative political spaces has crystalized in an ‘almost three-fold increase in citizen movements at the global level’, according to the book Political Parties and Citizen Movement in Asia and Europe. Various factors have contributed to the allure of these movements. On the one hand, membership in political parties has decreased and public dissatisfaction over political parties’ performance has increased. On the other hand, social movements have been particularly savvy to maximize the potential of new communication technologies to directly engage with their followers and put pressure on politicians.
These new engines for direct democracy have been fuelled by a myriad of new communication technologies available today. Currently, about 40 per cent of the population has access to the internet, a major increase since 1995 when less than 1 per cent did. Mobile phones also are broadly used: the number of consumers is expected to hit 4.77 billion in 2017. Likewise, with the proliferation of social media platforms, people have more ways to reach government representatives who use social media. Facebook has more than 1 billion daily users, while Twitter had 320 million users as of March 2016, and Instagram had 600 million monthly active users as of December 2016. At the same time, traditional telecommunications have morphed. Some people refer to a ‘podcast explosion’, for example, reflecting on the way radio has transformed to become a web-based medium. TV also has been forced to adapt to this new tech-driven era. Most shows, for instance, offer short streamed clips on YouTube in the hopes of gaining traction with the viewers.
This technological landscape has allowed political innovations such as ‘hashtag activism’, i.e. the use of Twitter hashtags for virtual advocacy to flourish. One of the most successful examples has been the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Born in the United States in 2012, the group rebranded the black liberation movement of the 1960s around demands for greater accountability in relation to the killing of African-American men by law enforcement officers. They have provided unprecedented visibility to this cause primarily through social media awareness. Some of their most pivotal accomplishments include the resignation of the University of Missouri’s president over claims of racist practices in campus. Also, in Georgetown University students succeeded in forcing their institution to rename buildings that bore slave-owners’ names. Most significantly, the movement was directly involved in mobilizing public sentiment to remove the confederate flag that stood in front of the statehouse in South Carolina.
Answer:
Yes, bcz Social movements have been described as "organizational structures and strategies that may empower oppressed populations to mount effective challenges and resist the more powerful and advantaged elites". They represent a method of social change from the bottom within nations.
Explanation:
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