Sean Dickerson Political Advocacy Blog

The speaker discussed many aspects of public involvement that was both consistent and inconsistant with the readings and class discussion. Her experiences as a campaigner and an organizer shed light on the role of the public and how it effects public policy and government responsiveness. In particular, our speaker addressed the role of violence in protests, establishing legislative priorities, and holding a protests to empower a group and that is neglected and show a display of solidarity, or to empower the organization and its members. In our class discussion, we discussed the role of violence in protests. Our professor, in response to a question posed about the topic, said that violence can be a grey area in which there is never a right or wrong answer. The speaker addressed this point by discussing what could be considered violence. The speaker felt that there is a distinction between tactical violence and senseless violence. She described senseless violence as acts of vi...

            The speaker, the articles and the class discussion covered a wide array of the public's impact on the development of public policy. The greatest overlap in thought was the speaker’s discussion of how polls effect politician’s crafting of legislation and the Washington Post article about the Republican’s decision in Congress to move forward with health care bills, despite being viewed unfavorably by the people. Other agreements between the speaker’s discussion of polling and the class discussion of public opinion existed revealing trends in public engagement and its effect on the creation of public policy.             In the Post article, the authors discuss the Republican leadership’s decision to craft “unpopular” legislation because of their voter’s belief in trustee-style representation, rather than the delegate style representation. Since t...