Communitarianism is about the biggest political development of the last couple of decades in Europe, and has some influence in the US I believe.
So shaming isn't really something that politicians/political scientists are ignoring.
Also the concept of the moral entrepeneur working to make behaviours morally acceptable or unacceptable is very well established in sociology.
So, I think both using shame and changing what is shameful are pretty well-established parts of the political armoury.[ Parent ]
It does come up from time to time. And, in fact, I gave a couple of examples of efforts at the use of shame in my article. There are others hear and there. For example, Bill Cosby's so-called pound-cake speech that set off a tizzy in the Black community in the US a couple of years ago. Certainly it is something that some people are aware of. But it isn't something that is used widely in liberal democracies and I suspect that has something to do with the very structure of liberal democracies themselves.
Blair, Schroder, and their parties consciously tried to create a Third Way based on Communitarianism as envisaged by academics.
When the rubber of theory hit the road of reality, the academics immediately complained that the real-life implementations were nothing like the shiny pure ideas that they'd envisaged.
In fact, I suspect that you apparently haven't been able to think of any modern campaign in either the UK or the US that attempts to guide society through the use of shame as good evidence that the idea is not widespread.
Ok, specific example from the number 1 Google result: Buckinghamshire County's illegal dumping "name and shame" campaign.
Specific example from the number 2 Google result: Barking and Dagenham's litter policy.
You can fill in the next 4,208 yourself... [ Parent ]
This is using shame as punishment for a criminal act when the question under discussion is the use of shame at the societal level for actions for which being made illegal would not reduce the actions under consideration. Hence the Prohibition example. When the sales of `intoxicating liquor' was made illegal in the US, per capita consumption stayed constant. Yet the various temperance leagues managed to use the pressure of shame prior to Prohibition to decrease per capita alcohol consumption by at least one order of magnitude.
So, let's rephrase the question to be more clear, what discussions have their been in Europe where communities are deciding to use public shame to change behavior for actions which are not illegal?
I did have to scan almost a whole page to find that one though.[ Parent ]
Second, when I point you at masses of data, like the Google and BBC results, you reject it for not being specific. When I point you at specific examples, you reject it because it's not evidence of "widespread use". Hmmm.
Third, I don't really see why it makes such a big difference for you that shame is used alone. I think you're making a bit of an assumption: that the use of shame actually works.
Shaming was a trendy idea for a while, but like many lovely ideas, there was an unfortunate lack of evidence that it actually worked. So politically, you've either got to use it alongside things that do work so you can pretend it does, or else confine it to things like soft drink prices where you're making a purely token effort.
The important thing is that you're using an innovative new strategy that your political opponent didn't think of first. [ Parent ]
Second, I didn't reject your Google results for being too general. I rejected them for being about something entirely other than the question I was discussing. I fail to see how a tendency by governments to use shame as a punishment for illegal acts addresses the idea that some behaviors breed disrespect for the law if made illegal and, even though they cannot effectively be controlled by the law, they can be controlled by shame if the government is able to shape the non-government sources of what people consider to be noble or shameful. Even the projects you linked to that don't cover something illegal, don't really take this approach but attempt to use shame entirely punitively based on an assumption about what society will think is shameful.
Third, I have alleged that this idea was not particularly widespread in the past few decades. You've said that I'm off my rocker and that it's been a hot topic, perhaps one of the hottest topics for the past twenty years. If it has been such a hot topic, I would expect a tremendous amount of discussion. But you've yet to point me towards any evidence of such discussion except, possibly, for one link to a local governing authority which might be applicable.
What I think happened is that you saw the word `shame' and though to yourself `oh, he's talking about X' which is all over the news when in fact I'm not addressing X at all. It's as if I were talking about a moral campaign to increase voluntary contributions to governments and you replied with a bunch of links about mandatory taxes. Such discussion about taxes just isn't relevant to the idea of voluntary contributions.
