Through a reinterpretation of publications, interviews with long-term activists, and an analysis of change in the social environment, this article explains why feminist ideology failed to create unity among feminist women in the United States during the period 1966-1975, the years when contemporary feminism emerged. In spite of the desire to create a community of women to challenge the existing sociocultural structure, schisms within the movement often created divisive and antagonistic feminist group relations. In contrast to earlier research that attributed (...) this lack of unity to competing ideologies, this article argues that, in many cases, feminist leaders used ideology and theory to promote radical self-identities that maintained existing social structural divisions. Thus, while feminism established a principle of unity for women as a group, disputes over ideological purity created divisions within the movement based on differences among women. (shrink)

The political and social crises of the past decade in a number of developed democracies have exposed an institutional weakness in both the state and the supranational regulation mechanisms. The result thereof is the decreased legitimacy of the decisions passed and the undermined trust to the existing models of democratic governance in general. The empirical research shows that the contemporary democratic regimes feature a dramatic deterioration of democratic legitimacy, at least among the public. Even when in operation, the full-fldged democratic (...) mechanisms are signifiantly limited in their applications. The elite circles pass decisions pursuing their own interests by using democratic institutes. At the same time, the globalization trends also create serious challenges: with decision-making moved up to the supranational level of power, the public signifiantly lose their inflence on shaping the political course, which results in the loss of trust to and support of the government institutions. Reference to the methodological frame introduced within the post-democracy concept allows fistly to reveal the key characteristic features of the socio-political development, and secondly to bring out the specifi nature and the main challenges facing the contemporary democratic regimes and legitimation of political decisions in particular. Looking into the main tendencies of post-democratic development, namely social group identifiation diffusion, evisceration of the personality of mass political parties, marketisation of political representation, intertwining of state and the private sectors, commercialization of citizenship, have proved them to cause changes in the conventional content of legitimation practices. The cardinal challenge of post-democratic development is the commercialized power legitimacy as this phenomenon has the potential for replacing the traditional civil forms of public participation in public life with political consumerism and for transforming accordingly the ideas of the place and the role of a citizen as a subject of the political process while technocratizing the political governance even further. The risk created by the trends described above include dependence of the legitimacy of the contemporary democratic regimes on the adequate level of economic stability and wellbeing of people, which is extremely diffiult to keep maintaining under non-linear development and risks brought about by the globalization processes. An economic collapse conditioned by the external factors or ineffective decisions made by the political elite is more than likely to provoke a crisis resulting in social tension or even a social conflct. Therefore, gradually commercialized legitimation practices of political decision-making in the contemporary democratic regimes bear more risks for the political elites and society as a whole in the longer term than sticking to the traditional forms of winning and maintaining people’s trust. (shrink)