The need for a translational science of democracy

The bitterly factious 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign was the culmination of several trends that, taken together, constitute a syndrome of chronic ailments in the body politic. Ironically, these destructive trends have accelerated just as science has rapidly improved our understanding of them and their underlying causes. But mere understanding is not sufficient to repair our politics. The challenge is to build a translational science of democracy that maintains scientific rigor while actively promoting the health of the body politic.

read more:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/914

see also: http://www.policysciences.org/classics/psychopathology_politics.pdf

From Wikipedia:

Lasswell's work was important in the post-World War II development of behavioralism. Similarly, his definition of propaganda was also viewed as an important development to understanding the goal of propaganda. Lasswell's studies on propaganda produced breakthroughs on the subject which broadened current views on the means and stated objectives that could be achieved through propaganda to include not only the change of opinions but also change in actions. He inspired[2] the definition given by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis: "Propaganda is the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influence the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends through psychological manipulations."[3]

Lasswell utilized Sigmund Freud’s methodology. Upon studying in Vienna and Berlin with Theodor Reik, a devotee of Freud, Lasswell was able to appropriate Freud’s methods.[1] Lasswell built a laboratory in his social science office. It was here that he conducted experiments on volunteers, students, at the University of Chicago [1] Using this instrument, he was able to measure the participants’ emotional state to their spoken words.[1]Lasswell was furthermore able to use psychoanalytical interviewing and recording methods that he appropriated from his time of studying with Elton Mayo at Harvard University.[1]

Lasswell was a “behavioral revolution” proponent.[1] Lasswell was credited with being the founder of the field of political psychology and was the man at which the concepts of psychology and political science intersected.[1] By utilizing psychoanalytic biographies of political leaders, he expanded the base from which potential evidence could be garnered. The benefit of this contribution is that he was able to engage in another method of research – content analysis. By being able to use preexisting data, he was in a position to show that his work was not purely positivist but also stepped into the realm of interpretivist as well – helping him to come together in studies of personality and culture in tandem with his political behavior research.

Content analysis is the “investigation of communication messages by categorizes message content into classifications in order to measure certain variables” [1] While the data existed to Lasswell in the form of analyzing the messages that Allied and Axis armies disseminated within warfare, it may not have been the most accurate of methodologies for analyzing the data. “Content analysts usually seeks to infer the effects of the messages that they have analyzed, although actual data about such communication effects are seldom available to the content analyst” [1]While Lasswell was able to perform this particular type of analysis, the weakness to this was that Lasswell could not verify his data due to communication effects not actually being available. This is because content analysis cannot study effects. While this was a weakness, he did develop content analysis as a communication tool that is still utilized today [1]

See also:  http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30164

especially: on the art of trumpeting...

Read also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11276

The collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-story building housing textile factories, a bank and shops in an industrial district north of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, on 24 April 2013, killing 1,133 garment workers and wounding 2,500, was one of the worst workplace disasters in history. This disaster, and workers’ grief, rage, and demands for justice, stirred sympathy and solidarity from working people around the world— and a frantic damage-limitation exercise by the giant corporations that rely on Bangladeshi factories for their products yet deny any responsibility for the atrocious wages, living, and working conditions of those who produce all their stuff.

Adding to the sense of outrage is the fact that, the day before, cracks had opened in the building’s structure. An initial inspection resulted in its evacuation and a recommendation that it remain closed. Next morning a bank and shops on the ground floor obeyed this advice, but thousands of garment workers were ordered back to work on pain of dismissal.

When generators illegally installed on the top floor were started up the building collapsed. Jyrki Raina, general secretary of IndustriALL, an international union federation, called it “mass industrial slaughter.” The screams of thousands trapped and crushed as concrete and machinery cascaded down upon them unleashed a full-spectrum shockwave, amplified by the anguished howl of millions around the world. The calamity made headline news. Consumers of clothes made in Bangladesh’s garment factories were confronted by their connection to the people whose hands made their clothes, by their miserable existence on this earth. Like an x-ray beam, Rana Plaza lit up the global economy, throwing into sharp relief a fundamental fact about global capitalism normally kept out of sight and mind: its good health rests on extreme rates of exploitation of workers in the low-wage countries where production of consumer goods and intermediate inputs has been relocated. The attention of the world was drawn in particular to Bangladesh’s poverty wages, the lowest of any major exporter in the world and death-trap factories — five months earlier a fire at nearby Tazreen Fashions killed 112 workers, trapped behind barred windows and locked doors while working long into the night; to the violent suppression of union rights and incestuous relations between factory owners, politicians, and police chiefs — no employer in Bangladesh’s garment industry has ever been convicted of an infringement of health and safety laws …

The garment industry is “the quintessential example of a buyer-driven commodity chain … where global buyers determine what is to be produced, where, by whom, and at what price.” Bangladesh’s garment industry distils the export-oriented industrialization strategy pursued by governments across the Global South. Said TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady of the Rana Plaza disaster, “This proves that, in the global race to the bottom on working conditions, the finishing line is Bangladesh.”

Starvation wages, death-trap factories and fetid slums in Bangladesh typify conditions for hundreds of millions of workers in the Global South, source of surplus value sustaining profits and unsustainable overconsumption in imperialist countries. Bangladesh is also in the front line of another consequence of capitalism’s reckless exploitation of living labor and nature: “climate change”, more accurately described as capitalist destruction of nature. Most of Bangladesh is low-lying. As sea levels rise and monsoons become more energetic, farmland is inundated with salt water, accelerating migration into the cities …

Rana Plaza not only shone a light on the pitiless exploitation of Bangladeshi workers. It lit up the hidden structure of global capitalism, revealing the extent to which the capital-labor relation has become a relation between Northern capital and Southern labor. The garment industry was first to shift production to low-wage countries, yet power and profits remain in the grip of firms in imperialist countries. This reality is different from the fantasies of neoliberalism’s apologists. Few dispute that Primark, M&S, Walmart and other retailers profit by exploiting Bangladeshi garment workers. Why else have they raced to outsource the production of their clothes to the lowest of low-wage countries? A moment’s thought reveals other beneficiaries: the commercial capitalists who own the buildings leased by these retailers, the myriad companies providing them with advertising, security, and other services; and also governments, which tax their profits and their employees’ wages and collect the VAT on every sale. Yet, according to trade and financial data, not one penny of U.S., European, and Japanese firms’ profits or governments’ tax revenues derive from the sweated labor of the workers who made their goods. The huge markups on production costs instead appear as “value-added” in the UK and other countries where these goods are consumed, with each item of clothing expanding the GDP of the country where it is consumed by far more than that of the country where it is produced. Only an economist could think there is nothing wrong about this!

read more:

http://steelcityscribblings.uk/wp/2017/08/17/how-imperialism-works/