Discourse, Dictators and Democrats

Many people take the trouble to vote even though each voter's prospect of deciding the election is nearly nil. Russians vote even when pervasive electoral fraud virtually eliminates even that slim chance. Could people vote or protest because they stop considering their own chances and start to think about an identity shared with others? With this in mind, Discourse, Dictators and Democrats presents a ground-breaking theory of what language use does to politics.

Introduction: A Protester's Tale; Part I Discursive Causality; Chapter 1 Voting and Repressing; Part II Russia Transformed; Chapter 2, 5. Material in this chapter first appeared in two journals. Some material derives from R. Anderson, Metaphors of dictatorship and democracy: Change in the Russian political lexicon and the transformation of Russian politics, Slavic Review 60, 2 (Summer 2001), 312-35. Slavic Review is published by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the material appears here with the permission of the publisher. Other material derives from R. Anderson,"Look at all those nouns in a row": Authoritarianism, democracy, and the iconicity of political Russian, Political Communication 13, 2 (April-June 1996), 145-64. It is used by permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis.; Chapter 3 Spreading Political Identity in Russia 1 Material in this chapter has been previously published in R. Anderson, Speech and democracy in Russia: Responses to political texts in three Russian cities, British Journal of Political Science 27, 1 (January 1997), 23-45. It is used by permission of the publisher, Cambridge University Press.; Part III Discursive Consequences of the Colonial Encounter; Chapter 4 Colonialism and Enfranchisement in Europe; Chapter 5 British Settler Colonialism and Victory in 1945; Chapter 6 The Global South;