Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities

Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities PDF Author: Amory Gethin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674248422
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since WWII. Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a treasure trove of information on the dynamics of polarization in modern democracies. The chapters draw on a unique set of surveys conducted between 1948 and 2020 in fifty countries on five continents, analyzing the links between votersÕ political preferences and socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, education, wealth, occupation, religion, ethnicity, age, and gender. This analysis sheds new light on how political movements succeed in coalescing multiple interests and identities in contemporary democracies. It also helps us understand the conditions under which conflicts over inequality become politically salient, as well as the similarities and constraints of voters supporting ethnonationalist politicians like Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump. Bringing together cutting-edge data and historical analysis, editors Amory Gethin, Clara Mart’nez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty offer a vital resource for understanding the voting patterns of the present and the likely sources of future political conflict.

Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities

Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities PDF Author: Amory Gethin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674248422
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 657

Get Book Here

Book Description
The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since WWII. Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a treasure trove of information on the dynamics of polarization in modern democracies. The chapters draw on a unique set of surveys conducted between 1948 and 2020 in fifty countries on five continents, analyzing the links between votersÕ political preferences and socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, education, wealth, occupation, religion, ethnicity, age, and gender. This analysis sheds new light on how political movements succeed in coalescing multiple interests and identities in contemporary democracies. It also helps us understand the conditions under which conflicts over inequality become politically salient, as well as the similarities and constraints of voters supporting ethnonationalist politicians like Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump. Bringing together cutting-edge data and historical analysis, editors Amory Gethin, Clara Mart’nez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty offer a vital resource for understanding the voting patterns of the present and the likely sources of future political conflict.

Why Democracy Is Oppositional

Why Democracy Is Oppositional PDF Author: John Medearis
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674725336
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
John Medearis argues that democracies face challenges which go beyond civic lethargy and unreasonable debate. Democracy is inherently a fragile state of affairs because citizens create the very institutions that overwhelm them. Hostile threats are the product of their own collective activities, and preserving democracy will always entail struggle.

World Inequality Report 2022

World Inequality Report 2022 PDF Author: Lucas Chancel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674273567
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
World Inequality Report 2022 is the most authoritative and comprehensive account of global trends in inequality, providing cutting-edge information about income and wealth inequality and also pioneering data about the history of inequality, gender inequality, environmental inequalities, and trends in international tax reform and redistribution.

Inklings of Democracy in China

Inklings of Democracy in China PDF Author: Suzanne Ogden
Publisher: Harvard Univ Asia Center
ISBN: 9780674008793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Since 1979 China's leaders have introduced economic and political reforms that have lessened the state's hold over the lives of ordinary citizens. By examining the growth in individual rights, the public sphere, democratic processes, and pluralization, the author seeks to answer questions concerning the relevance of liberal democratic ideas for China and the relationship between a democratic political culture and a democratic political system. The author also looks at the contradictory impulses and negative consequences for democracy generated by economic liberalism. Unresolved issues concerning the relationships among culture, democracy, and socioeconomic development are at the heart of the analysis. Nonideological criteria are used to assess the success of the Chinese approach to building a fair, just, and decent society.

The Pursuit of Equality in the West

The Pursuit of Equality in the West PDF Author: Aldo Schiavone
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674275713
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
One of the world’s foremost historians of Western political and legal thought proposes a bold new model for thinking about equality at a time when its absence threatens democracies everywhere. How much equality does democracy need to survive? Political thinkers have wrestled with that question for millennia. Aristotle argued that some are born to command and others to obey. Antiphon believed that men, at least, were born equal. Later the Romans upended the debate by asking whether citizens were equals not in ruling but in standing before the law. Aldo Schiavone guides us through these and other historical thickets, from the first democracy to the present day, seeking solutions to the enduring tension between democracy and inequality. Turning from Antiquity to the modern world, Schiavone shows how the American and the French revolutions attempted to settle old debates, introducing a new way of thinking about equality. Both the French revolutionaries and the American colonists sought democracy and equality together, but the European tradition (British Labour, Russian and Eastern European Marxists, and Northern European social democrats) saw formal equality—equality before the law—as a means of obtaining economic equality. The American model, in contrast, adopted formal equality while setting aside the goal of economic equality. The Pursuit of Equality in the West argues that the United States and European models were compatible with industrial-age democracy, but neither suffices in the face of today’s technological revolution. Opposing both atomization and the obsolete myths of the collective, Schiavone thinks equality anew, proposing a model founded on neither individualism nor the erasure of the individual but rather on the universality of the impersonal human, which coexists with the sea of differences that makes each of us unique.

The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right

The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right PDF Author: Jens Rydgren
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190274557
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 761

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Book Description
The radical right : an introduction / Jens Rydgren -- Ideology and discourse -- The radical right and nationalism / Tamir Bar-On -- The radical right and islamophobia / Aristotle Kallis -- The radical right and anti-semitism / Ruth Wodak -- The radical right and populism / Hans-Georg Betz -- The radical right and fascism / Nigel Copsey -- The radical right and euroscepticism / Sofia Vasilopoulou -- Issues -- Explaining electoral support for the radical right / Kai Arzheimer -- Party systems and radical right-wing parties / Herbert Kitschelt -- The radical right and gender / Hilde Coffé -- Globalization, cleavages, and the radical right / Simon Bornschier -- Party organization and the radical right / David Art -- Charisma and the radical right / Roger Eatwell -- Media and the radical right / Antonis A. Ellinas -- The non-party sector of the radical right / John Veugelers and Gabriel Menard -- The political impact of the radical right / Michelle Hale Williams -- The radical right as social movement organizations / Manuela Caiani and Donatella Della Porta -- Youth and the radical right / Cynthia Miller Idriss -- Religion and the radical right / Michael Minkenberg -- Cross-national links and international cooperation / Manuela Caiani -- Political violence and the radical right / Leonard Weinberg and Eliot Assoudeh -- Case studies -- The radical right in France / Nonna Mayer -- The radical right in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland / Uwe Backes -- The radical right in Belgium and the Netherlands / Joop J.M. van Holsteyn -- The radical right in Southern Europe / Carlo Ruzza -- The radical right in the UK / Matthew J. Goodwin and James Dennison -- The radical right in the Nordic countries / Anders Widfeldt -- The radical right in Eastern Europe / Lenka Butíková -- The radical right in post-soviet Russia / Richard Arnold and Andreas Umland -- The radical right in post-soviet Ukraine / Melanie Mierzejewski-Voznyak -- The radical right in the United States of America / Christopher Sebastian Parker -- The radical right in Australia / Andy Fleming and Aurelien Mondon -- The radical right in Israel / Arie Perliger and Ami Pedhazur -- The radical right in Japan / Naoto Higuchi

Divide and Pacify

Divide and Pacify PDF Author: Pieter Vanhuysse
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9637326790
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Despite dramatic increases in poverty, unemployment, and social inequalities, the Central and Eastern European transitions from communism to market democracy in the 1990s have been remarkably peaceful. This book proposes a new explanation for this unexpected political quiescence. It shows how reforming governments in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have been able to prevent massive waves of strikes and protests by the strategic use of welfare state programs such as pensions and unemployment benefits. Divide and Pacify explains how social policies were used to prevent massive job losses with softening labor market policies, or to split up highly aggrieved groups of workers in precarious jobs by sending some of them onto unemployment benefits and many others onto early retirement and disability pensions. From a narrow economic viewpoint, these policies often appeared to be immensely costly or irresponsibly populist. Yet a more inclusive social-scientific perspective can shed new light on these seemingly irrational policies by pointing to deeper political motives and wider sociological consequences. Divide and Pacify contains a provocative thesis about the manner in which political strategy was used to consolidate democracy in post-communist Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Pieter Vanhuysse develops a tight argument emphasizing the strategic use of welfare and unemployment compensation policies by a government to nip potential collective action against it in the bud. By breaking up social networks that might otherwise facilitate protest, through unemployment and induced early retirement, governments were able to survive otherwise difficult economic circumstances. This novel argument linking economics, politics, sociology, and demography should stimulate wide-ranging debate about the strategic uses of social policy.

Political Participation in Beijing

Political Participation in Beijing PDF Author: Tianjian Shi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674686403
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
In this first scientific survey of political participation in the People's Republic of China, Tianjian Shi identifies twenty-eight participatory acts and groups them into seven areas: voting, campaign activities, appeals, adversarial activities, cronyism, resistance, and boycotts. What he finds will surprise many observers. Political participation in a closed society is not necessarily characterized by passive citizens driven by regime mobilization aimed at carrying out predetermined goals. Beijing citizens acknowledge that they actively engage in various voluntary participatory acts to articulate their interests. In a society where communication channels are controlled by the government, Shi discovers, access to information from unofficial means becomes the single most important determinant for people's engaging in participatory acts. Government-sponsored channels of appeal are easily accessible to ordinary citizens, so socioeconomic resources are unimportant in determining who uses these channels. Instead, voter turnout is found to be associated with the type of work unit a person belongs to, subjective evaluations of one's own economic status, and party affiliation. Those most likely to engage in campaign activities, adversarial activities, cronyism, resistance, and boycotts are the more disadvantaged groups in Beijing. While political participation in the West fosters a sense of identification, the unconventional modes of participation in Beijing undermine the existing political order.

The Founding Fathers V. the People

The Founding Fathers V. the People PDF Author: Anthony King
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674062590
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book is an extended essay on the way in which the American political system functions, and the tensions that arise between constitutionalism and democracy.

Democracy Disfigured

Democracy Disfigured PDF Author: Nadia Urbinati
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674726383
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In Democracy Disfigured, Nadia Urbinati diagnoses the ills that beset the body politic in an age of hyper-partisanship and media monopolies and offers a spirited defense of the messy compromises and contentious outcomes that define democracy. Urbinati identifies three types of democratic disfiguration: the unpolitical, the populist, and the plebiscitarian. Each undermines a crucial division that a well-functioning democracy must preserve: the wall separating the free forum of public opinion from governmental institutions that enact the will of the people. Unpolitical democracy delegitimizes political opinion in favor of expertise. Populist democracy radically polarizes the public forum in which opinion is debated. And plebiscitary democracy overvalues the aesthetic and nonrational aspects of opinion. For Urbinati, democracy entails a permanent struggle to make visible the issues that citizens deem central to their lives. Opinion is thus a form of action as important as the mechanisms that organize votes and mobilize decisions. Urbinati focuses less on the overt enemies of democracy than on those who pose as its friends: technocrats wedded to procedure, demagogues who make glib appeals to "the people," and media operatives who, given their preference, would turn governance into a spectator sport and citizens into fans of opposing teams.