On the concept of political manipulation

Abstract

<jats:p> Much liberal-democratic thought has concerned itself primarily – even exclusively – with coercive interference in citizens’ lives. But political actors do things – they engage in influential speech, they offer incentives, they mislead other actors, they disrupt the expected functioning of decision-making mechanisms etc. – that fall short of coercion, yet may nonetheless call for normative evaluation and public justification, precisely because they serve to purposively alter citizens’ beliefs, intentions and behaviour. With this article, I explicate a conception of political manipulation to capture this sort of interference, and to distinguish individual manipulation from the manipulation of nonindividual agents like committees, institutions and states. The account, beyond being necessary for further work on the ethics of political manipulation, should prove useful to both normative thinkers interested in power, justice and the ethics of democratic decision-making, and empirical scholars in search of a conceptual apparatus to sharpen their investigations into the exercise of subtle forms of political power. </jats:p>

Stakeholders, social and environmental impact management as key factors of the corporate social management in the mining industry: A Peruvian case study

“…Finally, according to the theory (Blumenthal- Barby, 2012;Valenti & Giacco, 2022;Whitfield, 2022), there are several motivations for people's behavior; among them, we have (1) coercion (force or violence done to someone to force them to say or do something),…”

“…Finally, according to the theory (Blumenthal‐Barby, 2012; Valenti & Giacco, 2022; Whitfield, 2022), there are several motivations for people's behavior; among them, we have (1) coercion (force or violence done to someone to force them to say or do something), (2) convenience (favorable, opportune, or profitable state), and (3) conviction (ethics or politics to which one firmly adheres). In this sense, we can observe that in case 1, the company had a strong relationship with the communities; however, initially, it did not agree to participate in the solution to the contamination of the Chile River, but later, given the need to expand its operations, it agreed to build the wastewater treatment plant.…”

Hegemony of Political Parties and Regional Political Oligarchy

“…They found that political party dominance is often associated with high levels of corruption, due to a lack of accountability and transparency in political systems dominated by one party. Research conducted by (Whitfield, 2022) investigated the hegemony of political parties in several Eastern European countries after the fall of the communist regime. They show how political parties that dominated in the past still retained their influence after the transition to democracy, and how this influenced the process of democratic consolidation in the region.…”

Preventing the political manipulation of Covid-19 statistics: The importance of going beyond diplomatic language

“…The attempts to produce an agreed upon definition, let alone theory, of manipulation have not been successful. People can manipulate in different ways, and therefore rather than seeing manipulation as a single phenomenon, it might be more pragmatic to distinguish between different ways of manipulating (Whitfield 2020). For example, manipulating people directly to believe or do something may be very different from manipulating information, which involves illicitly changing the meaning of information (Billig & Marinho 2014, 2017).…”

“…Recently, there has been an interest in the general processes of manipulation and also in the ways that politicians and others might use language to manipulate their audiences (for instance, Maillat & Oswald 2009, 2011; de Saussure 2013; Maillat 2013; Cabrejas-Peñuelas 2017; Whitfield 2020; Masia 2021). One point should be stressed at the outset of this article.…”