The democratic ideals among the Palestinian journalists
Title: The democratic ideals among the Palestinian journalists Number of pages: 72+4 (appendix)
The Rocky Road to New Paradigms: Modernizing News and Citizenship Standards
There was a time when nearly everybody who was anybody among Western cognoscenti knew that the world was flat. All the maps showed it, the scientists confirmed it, and the church preached it. Anyone who nonetheless proposed sailing westward from Europe to reach India found himself without resources to undertake a voyage expected to lead to a disastrous drop off the edge of the flat earth. Anyone daring to even question the established paradigm about the shape of the world risked excommunication from the church and eternal damnation. Came Christopher Columbus! He was able to convince the Queen of Spain that testing the accuracy of prevailing geography paradigms was worth modest funding for ships and crews. The rest is history, familiar to all of us. Columbus’ trip proved that the earth is round. Still, it took a very long time before the scholarly community, the church, and the proverbial men in the street were willing and psychologically able to tolerate, accept, and finally embrace the paradigm switch. John Zaller is no Christopher Columbus. In fact, to carry out the analogy, he is probably more like some of the early converts who embraced the new, empirically grounded, round-earth paradigm ahead of the crowd. “A New Standard of News Quality: Burglar Alarms for the Monitorial Citizen” puts Zaller squarely into a small camp of iconoclastic scholars. These scholars have been laboring to bury the unsustainable belief that democracy requires citizens who fully understand all major policy issues and a press that supplies them with all of the necessary information. As a long-time member of the iconoclast group, I welcome John Zaller with open arms. I share his belief that American democracy can thrive even though American citizens (and citizens in other Western democracies as well) cannot and will not be held to the standards of the “Informed Citizen,” as Michael Schudson (1998) describes the breed. Full knowledge about all major political issues has become impossible. There is simply too much to know and most of it is extraordinarily complex, requiring technical, managerial, and political expertise beyond the reach of most citizens. I agree with Zaller and like-minded scholars that good citizenship in the 21st century requires a new paradigm and that the “Monitorial Citizen” serves the purpose quite well. That paradigm takes into account that most citizens lead complex lives in which civic duties are one of many pressing claims for each person’s attention. Given the strain on most citizens’ attention resources, it is also clear that the database that citizens
State formation and international aid: The emergence of the Palestinian authority
Abstract Thirty years ago, Samuel Huntington criticized Western aid policy toward new states that assumed that economic improvement in the standard of living coupled with democratic institutions would yield a more stable and democratic state-building process. An extensive political economic literature on the developmental state has since emerged that explores the complex relationship between state capacity, economic development and democracy, much of it critical of both the economist assumption, and the importance of democracy in achieving sustainable growth, at least in the initial stages of statehood. This literature, however, does not specifically relate to the impact of international aid affects state consolidation despite its critical role in the initial stages of new states. The paper explores how international aid affects on new state formation in the 1990s as reflected by the Palestinian experience, and more specifically whether Huntington's criticism is valid today regarding the international aid regime toward the Palestinian Authority established in May 1994. It shows that international aid was initially based on economist assumptions, changed course to reflect the importance of the state, and now must seek a better balance between the centralization of power, developing state capacity, and promoting civil society.