Practicing Democracy: Local Activism and Politics in France and Finland

This book is about the mundane, local, every day practices that constitutes democracy. It defines politicization as the key process in understanding democracy in different cultural contexts throughstudies ofFrance and Finland. By means of comparative ethnographic, media, and visual analysis that focuseson how democracy is actually practiced in different contexts, thiswork sets outa more nuanced and controversial picture of two opposite models of European politics. The familiar juxtaposition of Southern and Northern political cultures is set in a new perspective through comparative analyses of politicizations: the processes of opening political arenas and recognizing controversy.The book explores the ways in which people in different contexts deliberate, resist, and politicize, and hence practice, challenge, and transform democracy in ways that are of relevance to all political systems.

Table of Contents:
List of Tables List of Photos Check-in A Sociological Travelogue Local Scenes of Global Action: Group Styles of Local Collective Action and the Place of Politics Citizenship and Gender in Local Activism Visual Frames of Representing the Local Society Framing Democracy: Participation and Representation by Activists and Politicians Justifying in the Local Public Sphere: Newspaper Representations of Encounters between Citizens and Cities The Souvenirs: Politicization and Local Civic Practices in France and Finland Methods Appendix Data Appendix Bibliography Endnotes Index

About the Author :
EEVA LUHTAKALLIOResearch Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a member of the Helsinki Research Group for Political Sociology. She is specialized in comparative political sociology, and has published on local democracy, gender and politics, practices of everyday politics and citizenship, and methodological issues in political sociology.

Review :
'This book will serve as a model for anyone who wants to do comparative research on political processes, from volunteering to activism to official state politics. Luhtakallio carefully excavates the historical, institutional and cultural differences between one nation's practices of democracy and another's, without becoming mired in a swamp of detail, and without reifying the 'culture' of the nations being compared. Its extraordinarily useful and innovative combination of ethnographic, visual, and interview-based research methods, exceptionally clear theory, and a lively writing style make this into a book that non-specialists will enjoy and specialists will need.' - Nina Eliasoph, Assoicate Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Southern California, USA 'Eeva Luhtakallio has set up a fine mirror towards the examination of two countries. The approach is ethnographic, and the viewpoint actor-centered. This is delightful and renders Luhtakallio's book an important and significant contribution to the field of political sociology that has not seemed this fresh and vivid for a long time. It is also a great step in developing comparative research.' - Marja Keranen, Professor of Political Science, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland 'In this book, the main objective is to study citizenship with tools of pragmatic sociology 'in the making' and 'from the grass roots', through a study of two local political scenes. The approach distinguishes itself as new and radical. The author shows equal familiarity with her two empirical contexts, and her mastery of the French context in particular is outstanding.' - Loic Blondiaux, Professor of Political Science, Universite Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne, France