American Politics

In an age when the United Nations has declared access to the Internet a human right, and universal access to high-speed broadband is a national goal, urban areas have been largely ignored by federal policy. Federal policies have focused on rural infrastructure. Yet, the U.S. is a metropolitan nation, and urban applications offer unparalleled advantages for addressing both innovation and inequalities in broadband access. This neglect may result in the failure to realize the social benefits of broadband and a broadly-connected digital society. Connecting various levels of analysis, from the nation to the neighborhood, the authors break new ground and challenge assumptions in several areas. Offering evidence that mobile-only Internet users have dramatically lower levels of online activity and skill, they argue that this has become a second-class form of access, affecting many minorities and urban poor. Digital citizenship and full participation in economic, social, and political life requires home access. Using multilevel statistical models, the authors present new data ranking broadband access and use in the nation's 50 largest cities and metropolitan areas, showing considerable variation across places. Unique, neighborhood data from Chicago examines the impact of poverty and segregation on access in a large and diverse city, and parallels analysis of national patterns in urban, suburban and rural areas. Together, the chapters demonstrate the significance of place for shaping our digital future, and the need for policies that recognize cities as critical for addressing both social inequality and opportunity.

Some of the nation's wealthiest philanthropies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in education reform. With vast wealth and a political agenda, foundations have helped to reshape the reform landscape in urban education. In this book, Sarah Reckhow shows where and how foundation investment in education is occurring and analyzes the effects of these investments within the two largest urban districts, New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, centralized political control and the use of private resources have enabled rapid implementation of reform proposals. Yet this potent combination of top-down authority and outside funding also poses serious questions about transparency, responsiveness, and democratic accountability in New York. Meanwhile, a slower, but possibly more transformative set of reforms has been taking place in Los Angeles. These reforms were also funded and shaped by major foundations, but they work from the bottom up, through charter school operators managing networks of schools. This strategy has built grassroots political momentum and demand for reform in Los Angeles that is unmatched in New York City and other districts with mayoral control.

It is frequently assumed that the “people” must have something in common, or else democracy will fail. This assumption that democracy requires commonality – such as a shared nationality, a common culture, or consensus on a core set of values – sets theorists and political actors alike on a futile search for what we have in common, and generates misplaced anxiety when it turns out that this commonality is not forthcoming. Sharing Democracy argues that this preoccupation with commonality misdirects our attention toward what we share and away from how we share in democracy. This produces an ironically anti-democratic tendency to emphasize the passive possession of commonality at the expense of promoting the active exercise of political freedom. This book counteracts this tendency by exposing the reasons for the persistent allure of the common. Sharing Democracy offers in its stead a radical vision of democracy grounded in political freedom: the capacity of ordinary people to make and remake the world in which they live. This vision of democracy is exemplified in protest marches: cacophonous, unpredictable, and self-authorizing collective enactments of our world-building freedom.