Disability Rights Advocacy Online

Voice, Empowerment and Global Connectivity

Filippo Trevisan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138847828
• eBook ISBN: 9781317537052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Disability rights advocates in the United Kingdom and the United States recently embraced new media technologies in unexpected and innovative ways. This book sheds light on this process of renewal and asks whether the digitalisation of disability rights advocacy can help re-configure political participation into a more inclusive experience for disabled Internet users, enhancing their stakes in democratic citizenship. Through the examination of social media content, Web link analysis, and interviews with leading figures in grassroots groups on both sides of the Atlantic, Filippo Trevisan reveals the profound impact that the Internet has had on disability advocacy in the wake of the austerity agenda that followed the 2008 global financial crisis. In Britain, a new, tech-savvy generation of young disabled self-advocates has emerged from this process. The role of social media platforms such as Facebook in helping politically inexperienced users make sense of complex policy changes through the use of personal stories is discussed also. In addition, this book explains why British disability advocates adopted more innovative and participatory strategies compared to their American counterparts when faced with similar policy crises. This book reviews the implications of this unexpected digital transformation for the structure of the disability rights movement, its leadership, and the opportunity for disabled citizens to participate fully in democratic politics vis-à-vis persisting Web access and accessibility barriers. An original perspective on the relationship between disability and the Internet, and an indispensable read for scholars wishing to contextualize and enrich their knowledge on digital disability rights campaigns vis-à-vis the broader ecology of policymaking.

1 Disabled People, Citizenship and New Media

Disability advocates around the world have fought some important battles in recent decades. As a result, disabled people’s rights have advanced considerably on a global scale, becoming enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) since 2006. Both the United States and the United Kingdom led the way in the development of disabled people’s rights, pioneering the introduction of anti-discrimination legislation in 1990 and 1995, respectively. More broadly, these changes have occurred alongside a fundamental shift in debates on disability and society, which increasingly espouse the rhetoric and key principles of the independent living movement in the U.S., and the fundamental tenets of the social model of disability in the U.K. (Barnes 2007). However, more than 20 years after the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the U.K.’s Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), progress towards disabled people’s full social, political and economic inclusion remains incomplete in these advanced countries. In particular, civic engagement and political participation continue to prove elusive for disabled citizens, who consequently have fewer opportunities than others to influence policy decisions likely to fundamentally affect their lives.

In order to understand what lies at the root of disabled people’s exclusion from politics and policy-making, this chapter turns to both citizenship and disability scholarship. As disability scholars (Beckett 2005) and feminist writers (Lister 2007a, p. 49) noted, existing studies on democratic citizenship largely overlook disability, either because of its complex nature or due to a perceived lack of relevance to broader citizenship issues. To address this gap, it is useful to review the debates that underpinned the development of disability rights and relevant policy initiatives in the U.K. and the U.S. in recent decades. Empirical work is reviewed here that shows how so far disability policy has fallen short of promoting the development of full political rights for disabled people. The tendency for debates on disability policy to overlook instances of institutional discrimination within the formal and informal settings in which democratic politics is discussed has contributed in fundamental ways to the persisting entrapment of disabled people in a position of marginal citizenship on both sides of the Atlantic. As is discussed in detail below, formal participation channels such as elections and political parties remain off-limits to most disabled people. Disability rights activism has remedied this democratic gap in part. Yet, following the introduction of landmark legislation in the 1990s and until recently, these movements seemed to have lost much of their original thrust, while progress towards full citizenship for disabled people slowed down considerably. In particular, observers pointed out that U.K. disability groups switched their attention to a mere ‘defensive engagement’ of acquired rights, instead of fighting for their expansion (Beckett 2005, pp. 405–6). In addition, veteran disability scholars continue to this day to be outspoken critics of charitable organisations run by advocacy ‘professionals’ without disabled people in leadership positions, which in the last decade ‘have experienced a resurgence, while the power and influence of the disabled people’s movement has undoubtedly declined’ (Oliver & Barnes 2012, p. 169).

Having traced the contours of the exclusion of disabled people from the civic arena, the second part of this chapter asks whether new media technologies could support the creation of a type of politics better suited to the needs of disabled citizens. In particular, the idea that online media could provide disabled Internet users with viable channels to meet, discuss and self-organise outside established advocacy groups is explored. ‘Informal’ opportunities to participate in politics online, it is argued, could help disabled people circumvent the institutionalised discrimination that plagues traditional channels of democratic participation and promote a more inclusive form of citizenship. With this in mind, this chapter reviews the existing literature on disability and new media, which, while still a niche field, has expanded considerably in recent years. A critical look at this literature reveals the dangers of approaching the relationship between disability and the Internet exclusively through the access and accessibility lens. Restricting scholarly investigation to the perspective of those among disabled people who cannot benefit from online media, or only benefit from it in limited measure compared to others, is bound to generate partial and potentially misleading conclusions. Instead, there is a need for a broader and more balanced approach to the issue of disability and new media technologies. This should overcome the dualism derived from digital divide theories and account for the experiences of the growing majority of disabled Britons and Americans who regularly use the Internet in spite of persisting access and accessibility difficulties.

Second Class Citizens: The Exclusion of Disabled People from the Civic Arena

A comprehensive debate on the relationship between citizenship and disability is yet to be had. This poses a problem for researchers wishing to investigate the reasons behind the confinement of disabled people to a condition of ‘second-class’ citizenship (Tisdall & Kay 2003, pp. 25–8) as it generates a lack of clear reference points, whether in the form of normative benchmarks or more flexible working criteria. However, reviewing the evolution of legislation, policy and activism concerned with disability issues can help to track developments in disabled people’s position vis-à-vis the dynamic idea of citizenship (Faulks 2000, p. 3; Turner 1993, p. 2) and, more importantly, expose the roots of their political marginalisation. Article 29 of the CRPD, which was ratified by the U.K. in 2009 and has been signed but not yet ratified by the U.S., commits state parties to guaranteeing equal opportunities for disabled people to participate in political and public life, both through elections and referendums, as well as joining non-governmental organisations and other pressure groups. Nevertheless, both in Britain and America multiple competing conceptualisations of citizenship have shaped policy measures that so far have fallen short of promoting full political rights for disabled people.

Social Citizenship and State Welfare

For much of the post-war period until the 1990s, social policy in Western democracies found an important source of inspiration in the theory of ‘social citizenship’ championed by British sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall. At the centre of this paradigm was the assumption that, besides civil and political liberties, members of a democratic society also have a fundamental right to socio-economic equality and individual dignity. According to Marshall (1950), citizenship rights developed in an evolutionary fashion for which, after fundamental legal rights had been established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and political rights secured in the nineteenth century, social rights were bound to follow in the second half of the twentieth century. This deterministic vision called for government action to ensure the realisation of socio-economic equality, with the development of the British Welfare State from the late 1940s onwards arguably providing the ultimate testimony of the liaison between theories of social citizenship and the intended outcomes of social policy innovations in the democratic West (Heater 2004, pp. 271–3).

Although social citizenship theory marked a substantial advancement in the debate on the range of individual and collective rights associated with democratic ideals, it was criticised also for its inability to promote ‘full’ citizenship for minorities and disadvantaged social groups. In particular, critics pointed out that this view overstated the importance of socio-economic rights to the detriment of political rights and related civic responsibilities (Roche 2002, p. 77). Policy measures inspired by social citizenship theories, it was argued, determined in fact a perverse watering down of citizenship for those who were already in a situation of disadvantage by exacerbating their dependency on state welfare while simultaneously overlooking the need for them to become involved in the relevant public decision-making processes (Heater 2004, p. 274). Marshall’s view was tied too strongly to liberal ideals and excessively emphasised issues of socio-economic status over citizenship practices (Tisdall & Kay 2003, p. 21). The resulting policies took the acquisition of political rights for granted, supporting the development of an intrinsically incomplete type of citizenship (Faulks 2000, pp. 10–11). Furthermore, given the centrality of social class and the role of paid employment as a primary avenue for the achievement of socio-economic equality in this model, social citizenship has been criticised also for being primarily concerned with elevating the condition of white male workers (Turner 1986, pp. 86–7). As such, despite fostering important interventions for the reduction of poverty and deprivation (Lister 2007a, pp. 55–6), social citizenship was unable to cater for minority groups and guarantee sustainable dignity, fairness and empowerment for all in the long term (Fraser & Gordon 1994, p. 93).

In this framework, disabled people constitute a particularly problematic case due to their perceived inability to work and therefore benefit fully from socio-economic rights. Marshall tried to overcome this impasse by resolving to consider disabled people as entitled to state support without being required to contribute – at least economically – to society (Marshall 1950, pp. 45–6). This theoretical premise, strengthened by the framing of disability as an inescapable ‘personal tragedy’, fostered the establishment of a welfare system based on the idea of ‘needy disabled people’ that ‘added to existing forms of discrimination and […] created new forms of its own including the provision of stigmatised services’ (Oliver 1996, pp. 75–6). In particular, means-tested state benefits, the role of medical ‘experts’ in welfare administration and the failure to involve disabled people in key decisions over their own lives, both at the individual and collective level, have been criticised repeatedly for their disempowering effects (C. Barnes & Mercer 2003). Put simply, these practices sanctioned disabled people’s dependency on welfare systems that were not accountable to them and contributed to the consolidation of the stigma and negative stereotypes associated with disability, especially for people with learning difficulties and mental health problems (Drake 1999; Mercer et al. 1999, p. 154).

Dissociating socio-economic rights from participation in decision-making carries great risks for those that rely on charity-like welfare systems, who find themselves trapped between the bedrock of economic dependency on one side and the hard place of political marginalisation on the other. This issue assumes particular relevance in times of economic crisis and in conjunction with administrations that are committed to reducing welfare provision for economic, political or ideological reasons. Most notably, these issues became apparent in the 1980s during Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s ‘New Right’ politics in Britain and the United States respectively. In both countries, the hostility of government leaders towards some fundamental aspects of social citizenship, coupled with a period of economic instability and difficulties in influencing policy-making processes, put those dependent on state welfare in a highly vulnerable position (Dwyer 2004, pp. 61–6). Arguably, the erosion of social rights has continued in the U.K. in more recent years through the extensive austerity plans pursued since 2010 by the Conservative-led government, while in the U.S. social security has come under repeated attacks by Republican politicians during the Obama administration. Scholars such as Taylor-Gooby (2008) have pointed out that in Europe social citizenship is endangered by the growing emphasis that governments place on individual responsibilities over rights, as well as the rampant marketisation of public service provision. Therefore, contrary to Marshall’s expectations, these trends revealed not only that citizenship does not always expand, but instead that it can contract also when the members of certain social groups are unable to exert effective political agency (Turner 1986, p. xii; 1993, pp. 6–8). An apparent symptom of this participation gap is the limited extent to which disabled citizens engage with formal political processes, most notably elections, which is rooted in a series of discriminatory barriers and fuels a vicious cycle of exclusion and disempowerment.

Disabled Voters and Elections

U.S. scholars in particular have paid great attention to opportunities for disabled citizens to exercise their basic political rights in elections. Overall, this work has shown that disabled Americans are substantially less likely to vote than non-disabled citizens in federal, state and local elections. For example, turnout among disabled people at the November 2012 elections was 5.7 per cent lower than among non-disabled people, which is equal to three million voters (Schur, Adya & Kruse 2013). While this represented a slight improvement on previous elections in 2008 and 2010 (Schur & Adya 2013, p. 832), and was consistent with the existence of a disability gap in voter turnout in many other democratic countries (Schur, Kruse & Blanck 2013, pp. 104–6), it confirmed that participation equality is yet to be achieved in the U.S. This contrasts sharply with the preference of most disabled Americans for ‘big government’ and their consequent desire to be able to influence politics through democratic channels such as elections (Schur & Adya 2013, p. 833).

Although some of the disability turnout gap can be explained as a consequence of other types of inequality – i.e. low levels of income, educational attainment and socialisation (Schur, Kruse & Blanck 2013, p. 107) – legislation and inadequate government measures have been widely blamed for this situation too. Both the ADA and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed in 2002, contain a series of measures aimed at making voting more accessible for people with impairments. While this is not the place for a detailed discussion of the provisions made in this legislation, it is important to note that its patchy application and narrow interpretation by courts have led to improvements for some disabled Americans but not for others, depending on location and the types of impairments involved.

Various measures have been deployed in recent years to guarantee the accessibility of polling places for people with mobility problems. Nevertheless, as recently as 2008 nearly three-quarters of polling stations were found to have one or more significant impediments on the path between the parking and the voting areas (Government Accountability Office 2013). Furthermore, U.S. ‘case law is silent on the modifications required to accommodate people with learning disabilities, mental retardation or other impairments that affect the ability to read or interpret written language’ (Schriner & Batavia 2001, p. 671). This puts citizens with learning difficulties in an especially disadvantaged position when it comes to voting – a situation that also applies to the U.K. (Keeley et al. 2008; Redley 2008). More broadly, social policy too might foster low election turnout among disabled citizens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Disabled People, Citizenship and New Media
• 2 Online Mobilisation in Times of Crisis
• 3 Keep Calm and Tweet On: British Disability Advocacy Goes Digital
• 4 Policy Issues and Storytelling on Facebook
• 5 Communication Flows, Leadership and The Emergence of ‘Peer-Mediated’ Citizenship
• 6 One Size Fits All? British Innovators and American ‘Conservatives’
• 7 New Directions in Disability Rights Advocacy
• Appendix A: Semi-Structured Interview Guide
• Appendix B: Online Media Inventory Matrix
• Appendix C: Facebook Content Coding Frame
• Index