Challenging Executive Dominance

Challenging Executive Dominance PDF Author: Tapio Raunio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351370863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Bringing together scholars from Europe and North America, this book examines the engagement of legislatures across the world in foreign and security policy. The articles are specifically chosen to cover the whole range of foreign affairs questions from crisis management and military missions, arms trade, the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the European Union (EU), international energy agreements, to international trade negotiations. Drawing on a principal-agent framework, the book challenges the conventional wisdom of ‘executive autonomy’ in foreign affairs, with parliaments using multiple ex ante and ex post instruments to monitor, oversee and control governments in external relations. Moving beyond the ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’ image, the articles highlight the role of party-political contestation instead of consensus in the name of national interest structuring parliamentary debates and decision-making in this increasingly politicized issue area. Considering the lack of research on parliamentary participation in foreign affairs beyond the specific case of the U.S. Congress, the book will also contribute to theory building and will deepen our understanding of legislative-executive relations. The chapters originally published as a special issue in West European Politics.

Challenging Executive Dominance

Challenging Executive Dominance PDF Author: Tapio Raunio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351370863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bringing together scholars from Europe and North America, this book examines the engagement of legislatures across the world in foreign and security policy. The articles are specifically chosen to cover the whole range of foreign affairs questions from crisis management and military missions, arms trade, the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the European Union (EU), international energy agreements, to international trade negotiations. Drawing on a principal-agent framework, the book challenges the conventional wisdom of ‘executive autonomy’ in foreign affairs, with parliaments using multiple ex ante and ex post instruments to monitor, oversee and control governments in external relations. Moving beyond the ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’ image, the articles highlight the role of party-political contestation instead of consensus in the name of national interest structuring parliamentary debates and decision-making in this increasingly politicized issue area. Considering the lack of research on parliamentary participation in foreign affairs beyond the specific case of the U.S. Congress, the book will also contribute to theory building and will deepen our understanding of legislative-executive relations. The chapters originally published as a special issue in West European Politics.

African State Governance

African State Governance PDF Author: A. Carl LeVan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137523344
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Africa is changing and it is easy to overlook how decentralization, democratization, and new forms of illiberalism have transformed federalism, political parties, and local politics. Chapters on Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa help fill an important gap in comparative institutional research about state and local politics in Africa.

The Executive Unbound

The Executive Unbound PDF Author: Eric A. Posner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199831750
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Ever since Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. used "imperial presidency" as a book title, the term has become central to the debate about the balance of power in the U.S. government. Since the presidency of George W. Bush, when advocates of executive power such as Dick Cheney gained ascendancy, the argument has blazed hotter than ever. Many argue the Constitution itself is in grave danger. What is to be done? The answer, according to legal scholars Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule, is nothing. In The Executive Unbound, they provide a bracing challenge to conventional wisdom, arguing that a strong presidency is inevitable in the modern world. Most scholars, they note, object to today's level of executive power because it varies so dramatically from the vision of the framers. But there is nothing in our system of checks and balances that intrinsically generates order or promotes positive arrangements. In fact, the greater complexity of the modern world produces a concentration of power, particularly in the White House. The authors chart the rise of executive authority straight through to the Obama presidency. Political, cultural and social restraints, they argue, have been more effective in preventing dictatorship than any law. The executive-centered state tends to generate political checks that substitute for the legal checks of the Madisonian constitution.

Patterns of Democracy

Patterns of Democracy PDF Author: Arend Lijphart
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300189125
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
Examining 36 democracies from 1945 to 2010, this text arrives at conclusions about what type of democracy works best. It demonstrates that consensual systems stimulate economic growth, control inflation and unemployment, and limit budget deficits.

The European Crisis and the Transformation of Transnational Governance

The European Crisis and the Transformation of Transnational Governance PDF Author: Christian Joerges
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1782254900
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
The debate on law, governance and constitutionalism beyond the state is confronted with new challenges. In the EU, confidence in democratic transnational governance has been shaken by the authoritarian and unsocial practices of crisis management. The ambition of this book, which builds upon many years of close co-operation between its contributors, is to promote a viable interdisciplinary alternative to these developments. “Conflicts-law constitutionalism” is a concept of transnational governance which derives democratic legitimacy from the supranational control of the external impact of national decision-making, on the one hand, and the co-operative responses to problem interdependencies on the other. The first section of the book contrasts Europe's new modes of economic governance and crisis management with the conditionality of international investments, and reflects upon the communalities and differences between emergency Europe and global exceptionalism. Subsequent sections substantiate the problématique of executive and technocratic rule, explore conflict constellations of prime importance in the fields of environmental and labour law, and discuss the impact and limits of liberalisation strategies. Throughout the book, European and transnational developments are compared and evaluated.

Social Dominance

Social Dominance PDF Author: Jim Sidanius
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521805407
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
This volume focuses on two questions: why do people from one social group oppress and discriminate against people from other groups? and why is this oppression so mind numbingly difficult to eliminate? The answers to these questions are framed using the conceptual framework of social dominance theory. Social dominance theory argues that the major forms of intergroup conflict, such as racism, classism and patriarchy, are all basically derived from the basic human predisposition to form and maintain hierarchical and group-based systems of social organization. In essence, social dominance theory presumes that, beneath major and sometimes profound difference between different human societies, there is also a basic grammar of social power shared by all societies in common. We use social dominance theory in an attempt to identify the elements of this grammar and to understand how these elements interact and reinforce each other to produce and maintain group-based social hierarchy.

The Narrow Corridor

The Narrow Corridor PDF Author: Daron Acemoglu
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224404
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
From the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics and the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail "Why is it so difficult to develop and sustain liberal democracy? The best recent work on this subject comes from a remarkable pair of scholars, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. In their latest book, The Narrow Corridor, they have answered this question with great insight." —Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued that countries rise and fall based not on culture, geography, or chance, but on the power of their institutions. In their new book, they build a new theory about liberty and how to achieve it, drawing a wealth of evidence from both current affairs and disparate threads of world history. Liberty is hardly the "natural" order of things. In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak and human freedom has been quashed by force or by customs and norms. Either states have been too weak to protect individuals from these threats, or states have been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate and precarious balance is struck between state and society. There is a Western myth that political liberty is a durable construct, arrived at by a process of "enlightenment." This static view is a fantasy, the authors argue. In reality, the corridor to liberty is narrow and stays open only via a fundamental and incessant struggle between state and society: The authors look to the American Civil Rights Movement, Europe’s early and recent history, the Zapotec civilization circa 500 BCE, and Lagos’s efforts to uproot corruption and institute government accountability to illustrate what it takes to get and stay in the corridor. But they also examine Chinese imperial history, colonialism in the Pacific, India’s caste system, Saudi Arabia’s suffocating cage of norms, and the “Paper Leviathan” of many Latin American and African nations to show how countries can drift away from it, and explain the feedback loops that make liberty harder to achieve. Today we are in the midst of a time of wrenching destabilization. We need liberty more than ever, and yet the corridor to liberty is becoming narrower and more treacherous. The danger on the horizon is not "just" the loss of our political freedom, however grim that is in itself; it is also the disintegration of the prosperity and safety that critically depend on liberty. The opposite of the corridor of liberty is the road to ruin.

The English Constitution

The English Constitution PDF Author: Walter Bagehot
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
There is a great difficulty in the way of a writer who attempts to sketch a living Constitution-a Constitution that is in actual work and power. The difficulty is that the object is in constant change. An historical writer does not feel this difficulty: he deals only with the past; he can say definitely, the Constitution worked in such and such a manner in the year at which he begins, and in a manner in such and such respects different in the year at which he ends; he begins with a definite point of time and ends with one also. But a contemporary writer who tries to paint what is before him is puzzled and a perplexed: what he sees is changing daily. He must paint it as it stood at some one time, or else he will be putting side by side in his representations things which never were contemporaneous in reality.

The Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics

The Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics PDF Author: A. Carl LeVan
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
ISBN: 019880430X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 833

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Book Description
This volume is an authoritative and agenda-setting examination of Nigerian politics.

Why Dominant Parties Lose

Why Dominant Parties Lose PDF Author: Kenneth F. Greene
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139466860
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Why have dominant parties persisted in power for decades in countries spread across the globe? Why did most eventually lose? Why Dominant Parties Lose develops a theory of single-party dominance, its durability, and its breakdown into fully competitive democracy. Greene shows that dominant parties turn public resources into patronage goods to bias electoral competition in their favor and virtually win elections before election day without resorting to electoral fraud or bone-crushing repression. Opposition parties fail because their resource disadvantages force them to form as niche parties with appeals that are out of step with the average voter. When the political economy of dominance erodes, the partisan playing field becomes fairer and opposition parties can expand into catchall competitors that threaten the dominant party at the polls. Greene uses this argument to show why Mexico transformed from a dominant party authoritarian regime under PRI rule to a fully competitive democracy.