Facing the Challenge of Democracy

Abstract

This introductory chapter is about citizen competence in political participation. In politics, the prevailing opinion is that citizens fail minimally challenging tests of knowledge of public affairs and institutions. And in the face of such skepticism are counterarguments opposing this judgment of the average citizen's capacity for political participation. The chapter argues that such differences both amount to the same thing—the capacity of citizens to make politically coherent choices. To gain a better perspective on the situation, the chapter argues, one must first attempt to understand as deeply as possible the properties of political preferences of ordinary citizens. In this vein, the chapter tackles a number of issues related to this topic, and provides an overview of the following chapters.

Communicating Policy-Relevant Science

“…None of the recommended steps is easy and none ensures success. Moreover, the article focuses on direct scientific communication, ignoring obvious questions about information flows through social networks (Southwell 2013), the media (Kedrowski and Sarow 2007), and interest groups (Claasen and Nicholson 2013)—all of which have been shown to generate possible uneven information distribution related to science. That being said, I offer a starting point.…”