Information and the New Movements for Citizen Participation

Hazel Henderson

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1974, vol. 412, issue 1, 34-43

Abstract: The rise of new participatory citizen movements for consumer and environmental protection, peace and social justice are grounded in an almost intuitive understanding of the persuasive power of information. In many affluent economies, such as those of Western Europe, the United States, Australia and Japan, the overarching strategy of these citizen movements has been to manipulate information and, in turn, to change prevailing views of what is rational. Thus, their chief mode of operation consists of assembling, restructuring, deploying and amplifying well-validated information and, then, with varying success, infusing this new data with the political power to affect social and economic decisions. Since I am a participant in, as well as a chronicler of, these movements, my observations are experientially and empirically based. Therefore, I make no claim to objectivity in this review of the innovative concepts, strategies and tactics of such citizen movements and their significant contributions to the political processes in advanced, complex societies. While such movements are now gaining strength and sophistication in many countries, this paper will focus on those in the United States—which Daniel Bell has described as the first postindustrial society—where it seems that the goals and values of the citizens are undergoing the most rapid and qualitative changes.

Date: 1974
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271627441200105 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:412:y:1974:i:1:p:34-43

DOI: 10.1177/000271627441200105

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().