Problems of Democracy: Probing the Boundaries

Problems of Democracy: Probing the Boundaries PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848880375
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
The present volume, which collects some of the papers read at the First Global Conference on 'Problems of Democracy' that the Inter-Disciplinary Network organised in April-May 2010, in Prague, attempts to contribute to this debate by addressing some of the most pressing issues about democracy today.

Problems of Democracy: Probing the Boundaries

Problems of Democracy: Probing the Boundaries PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848880375
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Get Book Here

Book Description
The present volume, which collects some of the papers read at the First Global Conference on 'Problems of Democracy' that the Inter-Disciplinary Network organised in April-May 2010, in Prague, attempts to contribute to this debate by addressing some of the most pressing issues about democracy today.

Public Governance in Asia and the Limits of Electoral Democracy

Public Governance in Asia and the Limits of Electoral Democracy PDF Author: Brian Bridges
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1849806349
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This book documents the search for a workable model of democracy in Asia. It explores the various forms of Asian democracy practiced to date, and throws light on where these models may have failed and where they may have succeeded. The case studies developed provide valuable insights into governance and democracy in Asia (North-east, South-east and South) a region that remains fascinating and dynamic despite the impact of the recent global crisis. The book concludes that whilst there may not be a model that works best in all regions, a key ingredient to a workable model must include sound gove.

Democracy and Political Ignorance

Democracy and Political Ignorance PDF Author: Ilya Somin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804789312
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant of politics and government. Often, many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This may be rational, but it creates a nation of people with little political knowledge and little ability to objectively evaluate what they do know. In Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin mines the depths of ignorance in America and reveals the extent to which it is a major problem for democracy. Somin weighs various options for solving this problem, arguing that political ignorance is best mitigated and its effects lessened by decentralizing and limiting government. Somin provocatively argues that people make better decisions when they choose what to purchase in the market or which state or local government to live under, than when they vote at the ballot box, because they have stronger incentives to acquire relevant information and to use it wisely.

The Agonistic City?

The Agonistic City? PDF Author: Li Pernegger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786999080
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
An exploration of Johannesburg's post-apartheid's city administration's governance of conflict from 1996 to the current day, in the case of service delivery protests and shifts in city policy. The author, Li Pernegger, focuses in-depth on the water wars in Orange Farm, insurgent informal traders in the inner city, and the billing battle fought by the middle class. This book provides deep insights into facets of protests: from the local state's qualification of the conflicts; its portrayals of protestors; its agonistic and antagonistic responses to protestors' claims; to power dynamics and the forms of agreement reached. Pernegger considers what the practical prospects of agonism might be for the local government to regard city strife in its practices of governance as a constructive – rather than destructive – force for change, and the realisation of democratic ideals for its ordinary citizens.

Setting the People Free

Setting the People Free PDF Author: John Dunn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Why does democracy, both as a word and an idea, linger so large in the political imagination today? John Dunn charts its slow but insistent metamorphosis from its roots in Ancient Greece to its overwhelming triumph in the years since 1945. Setting the People Free is an account of this extraordinary idea and its evolution.

The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy

The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy PDF Author: Demetra Kasimis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107052432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Argues that immigration politics is a central - but overlooked - object of inquiry in the democratic thought of classical Athens. Thinkers criticized democracy's strategic investments in nativism, the shifting boundaries of citizenship, and the precarious membership that a blood-based order effects for those eligible and ineligible to claim it.

Constitutional Failure

Constitutional Failure PDF Author: Sotirios Barber
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700620079
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Americans err in thinking that while their politics may be ailing, their Constitution is fine. Sick politics is a sure sign of constitutional failure. This is Sotirios Barber’s message in Constitutional Failure. Public attitudes fostered by a consumer culture, constitution worship, the lack of a trusted leadership community, and academic historicism and value skepticism—these, this book tells us in clear and bracing terms, are at the root of our political dysfunction. Barber characterizes the Constitution as a plan of government—a set of means to public purposes like national security and prosperity. He argues that if the government is failing, it’s fair to conclude that the plan is failing and that laws that are supposed to serve as means can’t in reason continue to bind when they no longer work. He argues further that constitutional success depends ultimately on a stratum of diverse and self-critical citizens, who see each other as moral equals and parts of one national community. These citizens, with the politicians among them, would be good-faith contestants regarding the meaning of the common good and the most effective means to secure it. In this way—showing how the success of a constitutional democracy is more a matter of political attitudes than of institutional performance—Barber’s book upends the conventional understanding of constitutional failure. In Barber’s analysis, the apparent stability of formal constitutional institutions—usually interpreted as evidence of constitutional health—may actually indicate the defining element of constitutional failure: a mentally inert citizenry no longer capable of constitutional reflection and reform. At once concise and thorough in its analysis of the concept of constitutional failure and its accounts of a “healthy politics,” the corrosive impact of Madisonian checks and balances (as a substitute for trustworthy leadership), and the outlook for meaningful reform, this book offers a carefully reasoned and provocative assessment of the viability of constitutional governance in the United States.

Sustaining Civil Society

Sustaining Civil Society PDF Author: Philip Oxhorn
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271056614
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
“South America is not the poorest continent in the world, but it may very well be the most unjust.” This statement by Ricardo Lagos, then president of Chile, at the Summit of the Americas in January 2004 captures nicely the dilemma that faces Latin American countries in the wake of the transition to democracy that swept across the continent in the last two decades of the twentieth century. While political rights are now available to citizens at unprecedented levels, social and economic rights lag far behind, and the fledgling democracies struggle with long legacies of poverty, inequality, and corruption. Key to understanding what is happening in Latin America today is the relationship between the state and civil society. In this ambitious book, Philip Oxhorn sets forth a theory of civil society adequate for explaining current developments in a way that such controversial neoconservative theories as Francis Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism or Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” cannot. Inspired by the rich political sociology of an earlier era and the classic work of T. H. Marshall on citizenship, Oxhorn studies the process by which social groups are incorporated, or not, into national socioeconomic and political development through an approach that focuses on the “social construction of citizenship.”

Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality

Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality PDF Author: Jacob S. Hacker
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631496859
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
A New York Times Editors’ Choice An “essential” (Jane Mayer) account of the dangerous marriage of plutocratic economic priorities and right-wing populist appeals — and how it threatens the pillars of American democracy. In Let Them Eat Tweets, best-selling political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that despite the rhetoric of Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, and other right-wing “populists,” the Republican Party came to serve its plutocratic masters to a degree without precedent in modern global history. To maintain power while serving the 0.1 percent, the GOP has relied on increasingly incendiary racial and cultural appeals to its almost entirely white base. Calling this dangerous hybrid “plutocratic populism,” Hacker and Pierson show how, over the last forty years, reactionary plutocrats and right-wing populists have become the two faces of a party that now actively undermines democracy to achieve its goals against the will of the majority of Americans. Based on decades of research and featuring a new epilogue about the intensification of GOP radicalism after the 2020 election, Let Them Eat Tweets authoritatively explains the doom loop of tax cutting and fearmongering that defines the Republican Party—and reveals how the rest of us can fight back.

Volunteer Tourism

Volunteer Tourism PDF Author: Jim Butcher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317750349
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Just a generation ago the notion that holidays should be invested with ethical and political significance would have sounded odd. Today it is part of the lifestyle political landscape. Volunteer tourism is indicative of the growth of lifestyle strategies intended to exhibit care and responsibility towards others less fortunate, strategies aligned closely with developing one’s ethical identity and sense of global responsibility. It sits alongside telethons, pay-per-click, Fair Trade and ethical consumption generally as a way to “make a difference”. Volunteer tourism involves a personal mission to address the political question of development. It draws upon the private virtues of care and responsibility and disavows political narratives beyond this. Critics argue that this leaves the volunteers as unwitting carriers of damaging neoliberal or postcolonial assumptions, whilst advocates see it as offering creative and practical ways to build a new ethical politics. By contrast, this volume analyses volunteer tourism as indicative of a retreat from public politics into the realm of private experience, and as an expression of diminished political and moral agency. This thought provoking book draws on development, political and sociological theory and is essential reading for students, researchers and academics interested in the phenomenon of volunteer tourism and the politics of lifestyle that it represents.