Contentious Politics And Democratic Theory

Human contention has always been an ever-lasting theme of social science research.Academic paradigms including class structure theory,collective action theory,public choice theory,resource mobilization theory,political process theory and contention political theory have held the saying right respectively in the western academic realm.Among the above,the last one aims to break through the situation where the social movement is focused by the western whereas the revolution is studied by the developing nations.It also attempts to assemble and research the social movement,revolution,revolt and global contention by putting the ideology dispute under the cold war away.Currently,the contentious politics has already been among the list of leading analysis paradigms concerning the group contention in the international academic field.Charles Tilly,an America politician,is regarded as the key backbone of politics process theory as well as the founder of contentious politics theory.Probe into Tilly's contention and democracy theory could help us know further about the western Contentious politics theory as well as the new direction of democracy research.This paper aims to comment and research Tilly's theory about contention and democracy from the perspective of politics and thus attempts to uplift it to the due position in the history of political thought.In the meanwhile,Tilly's study could also be an academic reference for Governance groups protest events and democratic construction in China.In this way,this paper possesses much academic and reality value.Literature research method,comparative research method,mechanism explanation method and case analysis method are adopted by this paper to concentrate on the contention and democracy theory of Tilly to dig further into his research concerning state,regime,violence and contention.His research on the formation of national state,contention and democracy are all original and he reaches the following conclusions:war making state and state making as organized crime;it is the formation of states that promotes the popular contention,which thus stimulate the democracy process in Europe.This paper carries out a discussion on Contentious politics research of Charles Tilly and put forward its status and contribution in the structure of this theory.Tilly probe into the motive,mechanism and case of this field,which provides specific research guidance;He devotes particular attention to the engaged contentious approaches as well as the presented structure of political opportunities;he makes the unique contribution to the research of contention methods(contention performance and repertoires).This paper researches Tilly's democracy theory from the perspective of democracy development.He holds that it is the mechanism and process instead of the sufficient and necessary conditions or other variants that should be studied by democracy.This paper probes mainly into his three crucial processes and related mechanism of his democracy theory:insulation of public politics from categorical inequality,integration of trust networks intopublic politics,and suppression of autonomous coercive power centers.His unique discovery lies in that the democracy of western Europe is achieved by the continuous fighting,which is accompanied by the blood,instead of the rational design or nation habit.Also this paper picks out the theoretical achievements of Tilly's contention and democracy research,containing study at Tilly's methodology on researching contentious politics and democracy as well as define the relation among regime,contention and democracy.Moreover,this paper points out the academic value of his research lies in the breaking of the academic barriers,and turns the study of contentious politics into the model of discipline integration;he challenges the popular paradigm and brings states back to the center of analysis;he converts the situation description into formal modeling,and implement the research on cause and effect mechanism;he blazes a brand new way to broaden people's cognition about democracy.Finally he clarify the relation between contention and democracy and defends for contention,which both open a new perspective of democracy study.Surely,there are also some controversies in Tilly's contention and democracy research,such as the mechanism could not be falsified;his research mainly covers the contention and democracy formed in national states in western Europe during a long period,whose validity for the research on contentious events in non-European states or those formed during a short period is still waiting for validation,and also he once in his late years attempted to generalize the mechanism and process of western democracy.At length,this paper makes explorations into the contention and democracy of recent China,as well as the reference value of contentious politics paradigm for China to govern current group protest events.Moreover,it investigates on the changes of democracy in China on the basis of politics process from the perspective of methodology.From the view of the reconstructing the relationship between state and society,the benign interaction between social group contention and governments could also accelerate the modernization of government's governance and the gradual realization of democracy in China.