War and Democratic Constraint

War and Democratic Constraint PDF Author: Matthew A. Baum
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691165238
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Why do some democracies reflect their citizens' foreign policy preferences better than others? What roles do the media, political parties, and the electoral system play in a democracy's decision to join or avoid a war? War and Democratic Constraint shows that the key to how a government determines foreign policy rests on the transmission and availability of information. Citizens successfully hold their democratic governments accountable and a distinctive foreign policy emerges when two vital institutions—a diverse and independent political opposition and a robust media—are present to make timely information accessible. Matthew Baum and Philip Potter demonstrate that there must first be a politically potent opposition that can blow the whistle when a leader missteps. This counteracts leaders' incentives to obscure and misrepresent. Second, healthy media institutions must be in place and widely accessible in order to relay information from whistle-blowers to the public. Baum and Potter explore this communication mechanism during three different phases of international conflicts: when states initiate wars, when they respond to challenges from other states, or when they join preexisting groups of actors engaged in conflicts. Examining recent wars, including those in Afghanistan and Iraq, War and Democratic Constraint links domestic politics and mass media to international relations in a brand-new way.

War and Democratic Constraint

War and Democratic Constraint PDF Author: Matthew A. Baum
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691165238
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Why do some democracies reflect their citizens' foreign policy preferences better than others? What roles do the media, political parties, and the electoral system play in a democracy's decision to join or avoid a war? War and Democratic Constraint shows that the key to how a government determines foreign policy rests on the transmission and availability of information. Citizens successfully hold their democratic governments accountable and a distinctive foreign policy emerges when two vital institutions—a diverse and independent political opposition and a robust media—are present to make timely information accessible. Matthew Baum and Philip Potter demonstrate that there must first be a politically potent opposition that can blow the whistle when a leader missteps. This counteracts leaders' incentives to obscure and misrepresent. Second, healthy media institutions must be in place and widely accessible in order to relay information from whistle-blowers to the public. Baum and Potter explore this communication mechanism during three different phases of international conflicts: when states initiate wars, when they respond to challenges from other states, or when they join preexisting groups of actors engaged in conflicts. Examining recent wars, including those in Afghanistan and Iraq, War and Democratic Constraint links domestic politics and mass media to international relations in a brand-new way.

Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics

Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics PDF Author: Kenneth Neal Waltz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description


Realism and Democracy

Realism and Democracy PDF Author: Elliott Abrams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415628
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
This book makes a realpolitik argument for supporting democracy in the Arab world, drawing on four decades of policy experience.

Brookings Big Ideas for America

Brookings Big Ideas for America PDF Author: Michael E. O'Hanlon
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815731329
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
" An Agenda for the Nation What are the biggest issues facing the country as Donald Trump and the GOP-led 115th Congress take office? Any new administration faces a myriad of issues and problems it must take on as it ascends to power. In this volume, Brookings scholars and others offer their solutions, from Ben Bernanke and Richard Bush to Richard Reeves and Dayna Matthew, from Bob Reischauer and Alice Rivlin to Robert Kagan and Elaine Kamarck, to Belle Sawhill, Doug Elmendorf, David Wessel, Bill Galston, and Carol Graham, as well as many others. These powerful essays engage and inform readers on a variety of timely, crucial issues that affect the present and the future of the United States. Much of the focus is on the threatened middle-class dream in America. On the domestic front, Brookings scholars tackle topics ranging from health care and jobs to economic opportunity and trade policy, to criminal justice and infrastructure. The alliance system, relationships with China and Mexico, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq are among the foreign policies issues addressed. "

Heads in the Sand

Heads in the Sand PDF Author: Matthew Yglesias
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 047008622X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Reveals the wrong-headed foreign policy stance of conservatives, neocons, and the Republican Party for what it is—aggressive nationalism. Yglesias reminds us of the rich tradition of liberal internationalism that, developed by Democrats, was used with great success by both Democratic and Republican administrations for more than fifty years. [from publisher description].

Every Citizen a Statesman

Every Citizen a Statesman PDF Author: David Allen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674248988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
As US power grew after WWI, officials and nonprofits joined to promote citizen participation in world affairs. David Allen traces the rise and fall of the Foreign Policy Association, a public-education initiative that retreated in the atomic age, scuttling dreams of democratic foreign policy and solidifying the technocratic national security model.

Who Speaks for America?

Who Speaks for America? PDF Author: Eric Alterman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801435744
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Journalist and historian Eric Alterman argues that the vast majority of Americans have virtually no voice in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. With policymakers answerable only to a small coterie of self-appointed experts, corporate lobbyists, self-interested parties, and the elite media, the U.S. foreign policy operates not as the instrument of a democracy, but of a "pseudo-democracy": a political system with the trappings of democratic checks and balances but with little of their content. This failure of American democracy is all the more troubling, Alterman charges, now that the Cold War is over and the era of global capital has replaced it. Americans' stake in so-called foreign policy issues from trade to global warming is greater than ever. Yet the current system serves to mute their voices and ignore their concerns. Alterman concludes with a series of challenging proposals for reforms designed to create a truly democratic U.S. foreign policy.

Ethics and Foreign Policy

Ethics and Foreign Policy PDF Author: Karen E. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521009300
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Democratic citizenship possible: MERVYN FROST

Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy

Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy PDF Author: Cathy Elliott
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 131720980X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This book looks at democracy promotion as a form of foreign policy. Elliott asks why democracy was seen to be the answer to the 7/7 bombings in London, and why it should be promoted not in Britain, but in Pakistan. The book provides a detailed answer to these questions, examining the logic and the modes of thinking that made such a response possible through analysis of the stories we tell about ourselves: stories about time, history, development, civilisation and the ineluctable spread of democracy. Elliott argues that these narratives have become a key tool in enabling practices that differentiate selves from others, friends from enemies, the domestic from the foreign, civilisation from the barbarian. They operate with a particular conception of time and constitute a British, democratic, national identity by positing an "other" that is barbaric, alien, despotic, violent and backward. Such understandings are useful in wake of disaster, because they leave us with something to do: danger can be managed by bringing certain people and places up-to-date. However, this book shows that there are other stories to be told, and that it is possible to read stories about history against the grain and author alternative, less oppressive, versions. Providing a genealogy drawing on material from colonial and postcolonial Britain and Pakistan, including legislation, political discourse, popular culture and government projects, this book will be of interest to scholars and students focusing on democracy promotion; genealogy; critical border studies; poststructural IR; postcolonial politics; discourse analysis; identity/subjectivity; and "the war on terror".

Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism

Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism PDF Author: Melvyn P. Leffler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691172587
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism gathers together decades of writing by Melvyn Leffler, one of the most respected historians of American foreign policy, to address important questions about U.S. national security policy from the end of World War I to the global war on terror. Why did the United States withdraw strategically from Europe after World War I and not after World War II? How did World War II reshape Americans’ understanding of their vital interests? What caused the United States to achieve victory in the long Cold War? To what extent did 9/11 transform U.S. national security policy? Is budgetary austerity a fundamental threat to U.S. national interests? Leffler’s wide-ranging essays explain how foreign policy evolved into national security policy. He stresses the competing priorities that forced policymakers to make agonizing trade-offs and illuminates the travails of the policymaking process itself. While assessing the course of U.S. national security policy, he also interrogates the evolution of his own scholarship. Over time, slowly and almost unconsciously, Leffler’s work has married elements of revisionism with realism to form a unique synthesis that uses threat perception as a lens to understand how and why policymakers reconcile the pressures emanating from external dangers and internal priorities. An account of the development of U.S. national security policy by one of its most influential thinkers, Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism includes a substantial new introduction from the author.