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Welcome to, The Arena: People and Politics.

Much of what politics is about at the micro-level and the intersection of grassroots people and politics includes: equal access to food, housing, services, and availability of Goods (social Goods and everyday market goods).

Meaningful political participation, the structure or configuration of political institutions, real institutional practices, and international relations or security may come in a distant second for many people, as important as they are.

The blog is made up of essays in politics, political culture, political sociology/history, and cultural- or society-based institutional analysis focusing on micro-level, grassroots, local, and local-national intersections in politics anywhere in the world, including the U.S. It is open as to theme. Blog essays may include policy suggestions.

Submissions are welcomed from scholars and should relate to concrete examples or issues at home or abroad. Analyses and Opinions are welcomed, 500-2000 words, preferable; they should be grounded in concrete events or phenomena from specific places, or the intersection of social theory and such case materials. Blog pieces cannot include personalized attacks on local officials, nor other local individuals or localized groups. Biography and personal experience is allowable — and even encouraged — if relevant to the argument of the blog piece. To make a blog piece contribution, see the contact page. Blog piece contrbutions will be reviewed for relevance and substance; it is not guaranteed that all blog piece contributions will be accepted. Please use internal hyperlinks, and, as appropriate, endnotes in Chicago Manual of Style (no in-text citations).

The blog is intended to be a mouthpiece for grounded case study, qualitative, and/or social-theory based arguments relating to concrete contexts. It may emphasize centrist and center-right political thought, although most normative viewpoints are welcomed. In that way, it is intended to fill a lacunae in writing from centrist perspectives. Centrist, center-right, and center-left perspectives are encouraged and welcomed. The writing may be less formal than academic journals and should be, nonetheless, grounded in place (local, national, or regional), references as appropriate, and analytically sound. The editor may elect not to publish, or may ask for some editing changes before agreeing to publish a piece in the blog. Contributions from abroad, and from people for whom English is a second or third language, are welcomed. Contributions should be in English (American or British are fine).

Important Notes: This blog does not accept financial contributions. It does not engage in fundraising. It does not promote business or commercial interests. It is therefore neither a business nor a non-profit organization. It is a private blog. There is no fee to contribute written blog pieces. The blog is presumed to continue but there is no guarantee that it might not be closed by external sources, or after some amount of time. It is hoped that it will continue as an outlet for interested scholars.

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Founder and Editor. Dr. Patricia Sohn, Ph.D., was a faculty member (associate or assistant) at the Univeristy of Florida from 2001 to 2025. Opinions in her blog pieces are hers alone and do not represent her current or past employers. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, as well as at other academic institutions in Political Science, Sociology & Anthropology, Law, and International Studies in the U.S., Israel, France, and/or England. She has received fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation (NSF-SES#9906136, Co-Pi Woods [Sohn], dissertation fellowship, Law and Social Science Program), and others. She has interests in grassroots, micro-level, and political sociological and/or historical institutional analysis of state-society relations; as well as qualitative and field methods.

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Politics at the Micro-Level

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