Many an activist and other members of the liberal left (sorry, conservatives, there's nothing derogatory about that term you use for us) has torn out his or her hair over apathy on the part of the general public. Why do so few Americans care about inhumanity and injustice? Worse, why do they often vote against…
1Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
Young people’s lack of participation in elections has been taken as a sign that the young are wary of representative democracy and reject traditional authorities. Instead of election participation, it is expected that the young want more possibilities for direct involvement in political decision-making. Fridays for Future (FFF) is a global, youth-led climate movement that has been able to mobilize millions of young people around the world into political action (de Moor et al., 2020; Wahlström et al., 2019) in times when youth participation is generally declining, especially in traditional forms of political participation. While many have taken this as evidence that young people dismiss representative democracy in favor of a more participatory democracy, in-depth studies of their motivations are still lacking. This article helps fill this lacuna by providing a case study on Finnish FFF par
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Adam Jentleson.
Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. Liveright, 2021.
Democrats had their sixty votes for a mere 212 days. From July 7, 2009, when Al Franken of Minnesota was finally sworn into office after winning by 312 votes, until February 4, 2010, when Scott Brown of Massachusetts took his seat after a shock win in a special election, the party had a sufficient majority to invoke cloture under the US Senate’s Rule 22 and close debate on legislation without needing votes from the other side. The last time either party had held sixty seats was in 1979. Given partisan sorting by geography and increased straight-ticket voting, Democrats will never pull it off again in any of our political lifetimes.