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One would not commonly associate democracy with Singapore, instead scholars have often described Singapore as an illiberal democracy and an authoritarian state. At the same time, all Singaporean school students recite the national pledge of allegiance in school every morning, in which they pledge “to build a democratic society based on justice and equality”. What do students know about democracy? Are they able to distinguish the characteristics of democratic systems from non-democratic ones? The purpose of this paper is to report on Singapore students’ understandings of democracy.

Using a qualitative instrumental case study design, 64 students from three secondary schools were interviewed and the social studies curriculum was analysed.

Overall, students had poor knowledge of democracy. Consistent with a lack of knowledge of democracy, most students also showed a relatively uncritical acceptance of hierarchy and deference to authority, and held a superficial understanding of citizenship. Civics lessons through social studies, and the school environment did little to promote students’ engagement with democracy.

The authors argue that it is important that students be given the opportunities to develop a basic conceptual knowledge of democracy, as they are not capable of discriminating democratic characteristics from non-democratic ones without it. At the very least, students should know the relevance of what they pledge relative to their nation’s model of democracy, or in the absence of a clear model, be encouraged to struggle with the various existing models of democracies so that, as the future of Singapore, they might determine and adapt the ideals that they deem best for the nation.

This paper is an original study of Singapore students’ understandings of democracy.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the disruption to civic accountability by strategic corporate action in the form of SLAPP suits.

This paper provides empirical evidence of the discursive processes underpinning participatory and emancipatory accountability regimes through the lens of deliberative democracy and the Habermasian ideal of the public sphere.

Within this paper, it is argued that the strategic use of SLAPPs by corporations presents a danger to both mechanistic and virtuous forms of accountability regardless of what deliberative democratic theory is adopted. Habermas’ theory of communicative action and notion of the “public sphere” is utilised to demonstrate how SLAPPs can result in the colonisation of public discursive arenas to prevent others providing alternative (in form) and counter (in view) accounts of corporate behaviour and thus act to limit opportunities for corporate accountability.

This paper throws light on a practice being utilised by corporations to limit public participation in democratic and participatory accountability processes. Strategic use of SLAPPs limit the “ability” for citizens to provide an alternative “account” of corporate behaviour.

This paper is original in that it analyses the impact on accountability of strategic corporate practice of issuing SLAPP suits to “chill” public political discussion and limit protest about issues of social and civic importance. The paper extends the critical accounting literature into improving dialogic and participatory accountability regimes.

The many discourses surrounding 9/11 place existing civic education in a tenuous space within the current political climate. The challenges of producing a universally acceptable interpretation and approach to democratic education have been compounded in the aftermath of 9/11. Due to a heightened sense of fear and an increased level of blind nationalism, many of the basic concepts in the Constitution, like equality, justice, and reciprocity have been temporarily de-emphasized for a more compartmentalized way of “American” living, based on concepts such as patriotism, loyalty, and safety. Given the current political climate, the time to revisit the goals of civic education as a conduit of a globalized deliberative democracy is now. The author argues that civic education programming would be better served if more emphasis were placed on the philosophical foundations of the subject.

Based on 178 in-depth interviews with evangelical Protestants in 23 states and data from the Evangelical Identity and Influence Survey (n=2,087), this chapter assesses the articulation of evangelical subcultural ideals with gendered family life, democratic individualism, and a two-earner, middle class lifestyle. Compared to other Protestants, evangelicals put more emphasis on husbands’ spiritual leadership, authority, and engaged fatherhood, and interpret wives’ employment as a pragmatic necessity and the outcome of expressive individualism. These ideals, in tension, produce a sense of “invested individualism” that embodies evangelical subcultural identity and facilitates the management and negotiation of gender, work, and family life.

This paper focuses on an analysis of the factors that contribute to differences in political attitudes and political participation of Russian capital owners. Such factors may include different size and type of capital, the degree of past political socialization, the respondents’ age and generational experiences, past/present well-being comparisons and education. The paper begins with a discussion of different theories that make hypotheses about the political behavior of capital owners. These hypotheses were tested in a small, exploratory study of Russian capital owners that I conducted in Russia in the late 1990s. The results of the study are then analyzed within two different but closely interrelated contexts: the wider historical context of social, political and economic changes of the first decade of post-Soviet transformation, and the micro-context of the respondents personal political, economic and social history. In the end, I return to the analyses of the original hypotheses and conclude with a discussion of which theory comes closest to predicting and explaining the results of the study.

This paper summarizes and compares the perspectives of the prior essays in this issue. Goes on to argue that education for democracy requires dialogical, authentic learning rather than the commodification of uniform, standardized knowledge and its acquisition touted by those marketizing education primarily for economic purposes. The paper calls upon educators and university scholars to resist the identification of learning with text scores, and to defend the traditional role of learning in the human emancipation of citizens whose knowledge and life lessons learned in school contribute to their wise governance of themselves.

To examine how different types of ownership, including investor-owned, employee-owned, and mixed models, affect the dynamics of participatory practices in the workplace, and the broader social effects of these differences.

Brings together literature from democratic theory and empirical research in workplace participation and employee ownership. The first step is to articulate the range of democratic practices from nondemocratic to strongly democratic. The essay then discusses the different forms that participation can take and the threshold for what can be considered democratic participation. It then considers different models of ownership and the impact of ownership type on participatory practices.

It is found that investor-owned firms cannot be considered strongly democratic and that worker cooperatives are more likely to be strongly democratic and cannot fall below the threshold of weak democracy. However, strong democracy is not necessarily a feature of worker cooperatives.

Little work has been done to consider the way the type of ownership affects the kind or degree of democratic practices that may be present in an enterprise.