TY - JOUR
T1 - Interrogating the civic epistemology of American democracy
T2 - Stability and instability in the 2000 US Presidential election
AU - Miller, Clark A.
N1 - Funding Information:
I would like to thank Stephen Turner and three anonymous reviewers for extremely valuable contributions. Participants in the brown bag series at the Robert and Jean Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison also offered a number of very useful suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. Any errors remain my own. The material for this paper is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. SES0296211.
PY - 2004/8
Y1 - 2004/8
N2 - Transitions of power are fragile, anxious moments for political systems. This paper explores how electoral machinery - the material and social technologies of casting, counting, and contesting votes - dynamically stabilizes democratic transitions. The paper analyzes the controversy surrounding the 2000 US Presidential election. For 36 days political stability in the USA hung on uncertainty over a seemingly simple matter of fact: which candidate won the most votes in the state of Florida. Interrogating the civic epistemology of US elections - the processes by which elections produce, validate, and put knowledge to use - the paper contends that electoral machinery functions to contain common uncertainties, contingencies, and conflicts that might otherwise destabilize democratic political order. The paper develops a model of electoral machinery as a loosely integrated network of sites including polling places, election administration, the courts, the media, and the American public. This network constructs credible knowledge in a distributed fashion and helps form an intermediate layer in US politics, integrating geography, state, and civil society. This network model of electoral machinery implicates both democratic theory and practical electoral reform.
AB - Transitions of power are fragile, anxious moments for political systems. This paper explores how electoral machinery - the material and social technologies of casting, counting, and contesting votes - dynamically stabilizes democratic transitions. The paper analyzes the controversy surrounding the 2000 US Presidential election. For 36 days political stability in the USA hung on uncertainty over a seemingly simple matter of fact: which candidate won the most votes in the state of Florida. Interrogating the civic epistemology of US elections - the processes by which elections produce, validate, and put knowledge to use - the paper contends that electoral machinery functions to contain common uncertainties, contingencies, and conflicts that might otherwise destabilize democratic political order. The paper develops a model of electoral machinery as a loosely integrated network of sites including polling places, election administration, the courts, the media, and the American public. This network constructs credible knowledge in a distributed fashion and helps form an intermediate layer in US politics, integrating geography, state, and civil society. This network model of electoral machinery implicates both democratic theory and practical electoral reform.
KW - Civic epistemology
KW - Democracy
KW - Election
KW - Knowledge
KW - Stability
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U2 - 10.1177/0306312704045661
DO - 10.1177/0306312704045661
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:7044235174
SN - 0306-3127
VL - 34
SP - 501
EP - 530
JO - Social Studies of Science
JF - Social Studies of Science
IS - 4
ER -