Acknowledgement of the importance of identity to politics and widespread concern about responding adequately to marginalized groups have made otherness a salient concept in contemporary political thought. Yet, there has not appeared in the literature any attempt to clarify the distinctive forms...

Alexis de Tocqueville's examination of the political and social climate over the issue of slavery in the textual culmination of his travels throughout the U.S. in 1830s, Democracy in America, casts a shadow over the sustainability of a single American nation-state. Although Tocqueville's...

Tocqueville's discovery of a muscular, participatory citizenship in the United States is well known, as is his argument that such citizenship is vital to the success of democracy. This has been a source of both self-congratulation and anxiety among Americans, the anxiety stemming from worries...

Recently, political scientists have marshaled an impressive methodological discussion of political ethnography. However, this discussion has yielded little debate about the potential for an activist turn in political ethnography. In order to promote such a turn, this paper takes on four tasks....

The paper suggests a practice turn in the analysis of political legitimacy. Current social science research on political legitimacy suffers twofold. First, it shows an undue (silent) impact of an ethics-first perspective. Second, empirical approaches to political legitimacy mostly focus on...

This paper shows that the main pattern of European democratisation has unfolded along the lines of an EU organised as a multilevel system of representative parliamentary government and not as a system of deliberative governance as the transnationalists propound. But the multilevel EU has...