In this groundbreaking book, sociologist Andrew Perrin shows that rules and institutions, while important, are not the core of democracy. Instead, as Alexis de Tocqueville showed in the early years of the American republic, democracy is first and foremost a matter of culture: the shared ideas, practices, and technologies that help individuals combine into publics and achieve representation. Reinterpreting democracy as culture reveals the ways the media, public opinion polling, and changing technologies shape democracy and citizenship. As Perrin shows, the founders of the United States produced a social, cultural, and legal environment fertile for democratic development and in the two centuries since, citizens and publics use that environment and shared culture to re-imagine and extend that democracy. American Democracy provides a fresh, innovative approach to democracy that will change the way readers understand their roles as citizens and participants. Never will you enter a voting booth or answer a poll again without realizing what a truly social act it is. This will be necessary reading for scholars, students, and the public seeking to understand the challenges and opportunities for democratic citizenship from Toqueville to town halls to Twitter.

When we think about what constitutes being a good citizen, routine activities like voting, letter-writing, and paying attention to the news spring to mind. But, in "Citizen Speak", Andrew J. Perrin argues that these activities play only a small part in democratic citizenship - a form of citizenship that requires creative thinking, talking, and acting. For "Citizen Speak", Perrin met with labor, church, business, union, and sports organizations and proposed to them four fictive scenarios: what if your senator is involved in a scandal, or your police department is engaged in racial profiling, or a local factory violates pollution law, or your neighborhood is going to be the site of a new airport? The conversations these scenarios inspire, Perrin shows, require imagination. And, what people can imagine doing in response to those scenarios depends on what's possible, what's important, what's right, and what's feasible. By talking with one another, an engaged citizenry draws from a repertoire of personal and institutional resources to understand and reimagine responses to situations as they arise. Building on such political discussions, "Citizen Speak" shows how a rich culture of association and democratic discourse provides the infrastructure for a healthy democracy.

During the occupation of West Germany after the Second World War, the American authorities commissioned polls to assess the values and opinions of ordinary Germans. They concluded that the fascist attitudes of the Nazi era had weakened to a large degree. Theodor W. Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues, who returned in 1949 from the United States, were skeptical. They held that standardized polling was an inadequate and superficial method for exploring such questions. In their view, public opinion is not simply an aggregate of individually held opinions, but is fundamentally a public concept, formed through interaction in conversations and with prevailing attitudes and ideas "in the air." In Group Experiment, edited by Friedrich Pollock, they published their findings on their group discussion experiments that delved deeper into the process of opinion formation. Andrew J. Perrin and Jeffrey K. Olick make a case that these experiments are an important missing link in the ontology and methodology of current social-science survey research.

Beginning in 1949, Theodor W. Adorno and other members of the reconstituted Frankfurt Institute for Social Research undertook a massive empirical study of German opinions about the legacies of the Nazis, applying and modifying techniques they had learned during their U.S. exile. They published their results in 1955 as a research monograph edited by Friedrich Pollock. The study's qualitative results are published here for the first time in English as Guilt and Defense, a psychoanalytically informed analysis of the rhetorical and conceptual mechanisms with which postwar Germans most often denied responsibility for the Nazi past. In their editorial introduction, Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin show how Adorno's famous 1959 essay "The Meaning of Working through the Past," is comprehensible only as a conclusion to his long-standing research and as a reaction to the debate it stirred; this volume also includes a critique by psychologist Peter R. Hoffstater as well as Adorno's rejoinder. This previously little-known debate provides important new perspectives on postwar German political culture, on the dynamics of collective memory, and on Adorno's intellectual legacies, which have contributed more to empirical social research than has been acknowledged. A companion volume, Group Experiment and Other Writings, will present the first book-length English translation of the Frankfurt Group's conceptual, methodological, and theoretical innovations in public opinion research.