Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic

“Swear words” and “curse words” in Australian (and American) English. At the crossroads of pragmatics, semantics and sociolinguistics

“…Finally, another factor that militates against the use of swear/curse words in the public domain in the USA are traditional American ideals of eloquence and civility in public life (cf. Gustafson 2011;Silverstein 2003). Australian public life, by contrast, is characterised by an appreciation of "irreverence" and a distrust of eloquence and verbal technique, in favour of ordinariness (Goddard 2006(Goddard , 2013Malouf 2004).…”

Introduction: The New England Town Meeting: A Founding Myth of American Democracy

“…Finally, historical investigation has also favored the emergence of two trends characteristic of contemporary deliberative democratic scholarship: the expansion of the concept of deliberation; and the adoption of deliberative theories by an increasing number of fields in political and sociological studies (see, for instance Polletta, 2002). Yet despite its apparent efficacy, and notwithstanding notable exceptions (Bacqué and Sintomer, 2011;Della Porta, 2014;Cossart, 2013;Cossart and Talpin, 2015;Gustafson, 2011;Chambers, 2000), historical investigation is far from central in deliberative scholarship and even recent work on participatory research stresses the need for more historical work (Cossart, Talpin and Keith, 2012;Font, Della Porta and Sintomer, 2012). The aim of this issue is to assess and to draw attention to the contribution of historical analysis in the current scholarly debate on democracy, in particular regarding the ways in which participation and deliberation emerge and develop in a range of different contexts.…”