Author: Joel D. Barkan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781770112179
Category : Legislative bodies
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Book Description

Author: David Arter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317998154
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Recent years have witnessed substantial work in the legislative studies field. But what do we know about legislatures today and are there clear criteria for comparing and classifying them? This is a new review of the state of our knowledge of parliament and tackles key questions: Do legislatures matter in legislative terms, and, if so, how much? What is the extent of the legislature’s control of the legislative process. How can we classify legislatures on the basis of their relative legislative performance. Five measures of the policy power of parliaments are applied in the country/region chapters. This book was previously published as a special issue of the leading Journal of Legislative Studies.

Author: Ken Ochieng' Opalo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110849210X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Examined the development of legislatures under colonial rule, post-colonial autocratic single party rule, and multi-party politics in Africa.

Author: Shane Martin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198890850
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
By whatever name they are known (Parliaments, Legislatures, or Assemblies, to name but three) legislative assemblies in democratic societies face the twin challenges of institutional capacity and accountability to their citizens. In addressing these challenges, assemblies vary in the extent to which they serve the respective interests of three critical sets of actors: their members, party leaders, and voters. In this book, Shane Martin and Kaare W. Strøm identify three ideal types of democratic assemblies - the members' assembly, the leaders' assembly, and the voters' assembly - and analyze national legislative assemblies in the world's 68 most populous democracies, from Finland to Papua New Guinea, in light of these models. Based on extensive new cross-national data, they trace the implications of the three assembly types for the design, internal organization, resources, and powers of democratic national assemblies, develop indices of each assembly type, and score each of the 68 legislative assemblies on these indices. The analysis of legislative re-election rates in these countries reveals that the fate of incumbents depends on member resources as well as on leadership control, but is ultimately constrained by voter confidence. In conclusion, the authors discuss the past and future trajectories of legislative assemblies, including their susceptibility to democratic backsliding.

Author: Niamh Gaynor
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000597067
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
This book investigates women’s political participation in Africa. Going beyond the formal institutions of electoral politics, it explores a range of spaces where everyday politics take place, at national and at local levels. In recent years there have been significant improvements in the number of women elected to parliament in Africa. However, there is little indication that this is translating into better developmental outcomes, and indeed there is mounting evidence that it could in fact help to bolster some authoritarian regimes. Starting from the premise that politics is a far broader project than securing a seat in national or local legislatures alone, this book explores the opportunities for women’s political participation across a number of informal spaces where women and men gather, organise and interact in a more regular and systematic manner. Combining insights from political science, sociology and feminist theory and drawing on detailed cases from the Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Rwanda, it examines how power in its multiple dimensions circulates across a range of everyday political spaces, while drawing attention to the links between domestic gender inequalities and the global political economy. Inviting scholars, practitioners and activists to broaden their focus beyond formal electoral institutions if they want to support women to become more politically active, this book provides fresh insights into major issues at the heart of African studies, development studies, gender and development, democratisation, and international relations.

Author: Mark Baskin
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 073918069X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This book explores the increasing use of Constituency Development Funds (CDFs) in emerging democratic governments in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Oceania. CDFs dedicate public money to benefit parliamentary constituencies through allocations and/or spending decisions influenced by Members of Parliament (MPs). The contributors employ the term CDF as a generic term although such funds have a different names, such as electoral development funds (Papua New Guinea), constituency development catalyst funds (Tanzania), or Member of Parliament Local Area Development Fund (India), etc. In some ways, the funds resemble the ad hoc pork barrel policy-making employed in the U.S. Congress for the past 200 years. However, unlike earmarks, CDFs generally become institutionalized in the government’s annual budget and are distributed according to different criteria in each country. They enable MPs to influence programs in their constituencies that finance education, and build bridges, roads, community centers, clinics and schools. In this sense, a CDF is a politicized form of spending that can help fill in the important gaps in government services in constituencies that have not been addressed in the government’s larger, comprehensive policy programs. This first comprehensive treatment of CDFs in the academic and development literatures emerges from a project at the State University of New York Center for International Development. This project has explored CDFs in 19 countries and has developed indicators on their emergence, operations, and oversight. The contributors provide detailed case studies of the emergence and operations of CDFs in Kenya, Uganda, Jamaica, and India, as well as an analysis of earmarks in the U.S. Congress, and a broader analysis of the emergence of the funds in Africa. They cover the emergence, institutionalization, and accountability of these funds; analyze key issues in their operations; and offer provisional conclusions of what the emergence and operations of these funds say about the democratization of politics in developing countries and current approaches to international support for democratic governance in developing countries.

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.

Author: J. Piombo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403978867
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Ten years into the 'new' South Africa, how does democracy function? This volume provides a retrospective on a decade of elections and democracy in South Africa. The book analyzes the evolution of the party system and electoral campaigns; tracks changes in public opinion and voter motivations; assesses the political implications of socioeconomic change; depicts the evolution of parliament and the electoral system; probes the often-tense relationship between media and government; analyzes the institutionalization the Independent Electoral Commission; and, finally, argues that South Africa is witnessing a 'normalization' of politics. The book speaks to a broad range of topics, all linked through the electoral theme, which get to the heart of many issues in contemporary South African politics.

Author: C. Holtz-Bacha
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230374956
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Opinion Polls and the Media provides the most comprehensive analysis to date on the relationship between the media, opinion polls, and public opinion. Looking at the extent to which the media, through their use of opinion polls, both reflect and shape public opinion, it brings together a team of leading scholars and analyzes theoretical and methodological approaches to the media and their use of opinion polls. The contributors explore how the media use opinion polls in a range of countries across the world, and analyze the effects and uses of opinion polls by the public as well as political actors.

Author: Holli A Semetko
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1446265986
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
This authoritative and comprehensive survey of political communication draws together a team of the world′s leading scholars to provide a state-of-the-art review that sets the agenda for future study. It is divided into five sections: Part One: explores the macro-level influences on political communication such as the media industry, new media, technology, and political systems Part Two: takes a grassroots perspective of the influences of social networks - real and online - on political communication Part Three: discusses methodological advances in political communication research Part Four: focuses on power and how it is conceptualized in political communication Part Five: provides an international, regional, and comparative understanding of political communication in its various contexts The SAGE Handbook of Political Communication is an essential benchmark publication for advanced students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of politics, media and communication, sociology and research methods.