Author: Jesse Craig Ribot
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
References pp. 115-132.

Author: David Litt
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062879383
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
New York Times–Bestselling Author: “Brings Dave Barry-style humor to an illuminating book on what is wrong with American democracy—and how to put it right.” —The Washington Post The democracy you live in today is different—completely different—from the democracy you were born into. You probably don't realize just how radically your republic has been altered during your lifetime. Yet more than any policy issue, political trend, or even Donald Trump himself, our redesigned system of government is responsible for the peril America faces today. What explains the gap between what We, the People want and what our elected leaders do? How can we fix our politics before it's too late? And how can we truly understand the state of our democracy without wanting to crawl under a rock? That’s what former Obama speechwriter David Litt set out to answer. Poking into forgotten corners of history, translating political science into plain English, and traveling the country to meet experts and activists, Litt explains how the world’s greatest experiment in democracy went awry. (He also tries to crash a party at Mitch McConnell’s former frat house. It goes poorly.) The result is something you might not have thought possible: an unexpectedly funny page-turner about the political process. You’ll meet the Supreme Court justice charged with murder, learn how James Madison’s college roommate broke the Senate, encounter a citrus thief who embodies what’s wrong with our elections, and join Belle the bill as she tries to become a law (a quest far more harrowing than the one in Schoolhouse Rock!). Yet despite his clear-eyed assessment of the dangers we face, Litt remains audaciously optimistic. He offers a to-do list of bold yet achievable changes—a blueprint for restoring the balance of power in America. “In the book’s strongest contribution, Litt shows how radically our democracy has been altered in recent decades . . . [making] the case that nearly all of these negative trends are occurring by design.” —The Washington Post “Wry, quickly readable, yet informed.” —The Atlantic “Equal parts how-to, historical, and hilarious.” —Keegan-Michael Key

Author: Carolyn M. Hendriks
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198843054
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The fabric of contemporary democracy in many liberal Western societies is in tatters. Citizens are disconnected from their elected representatives, they are fractured and polarised in the public sphere, and alienated from increasingly complex systems of public policy. These disconnects - in the representative relationship, in the public sphere, and in the policy-making process - are weakening the very fabric of our democracies. This book develops the idea of democratic mending as a way of advancing a more connective and systemic approach to democratic repair. It is informed by three rich empirical cases of connectivity in practice, as well as cutting-edge debates in deliberative democracy.The empirical cases uncover empowering and transformative modes of citizen participation and civic engagement that are vital for democratic renewal. The actors in this book are not withdrawing, resisting or seeking autonomy from conventional institutions of representative democracy but actively experimenting with ways to improve and engage with them. Through their everyday practices of democratic mending they undertake crucial systemic repair work and strengthen the integrity of our democratic fabric in ways that are yet to be fully acknowledged by scholars and practitioners of democratic reform.

Author: Nancy Isenberg
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525557520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
"Told with authority and style. . . Crisply summarizing the Adamses' legacy, the authors stress principle over partisanship."--The Wall Street Journal How the father and son presidents foresaw the rise of the cult of personality and fought those who sought to abuse the weaknesses inherent in our democracy. Until now, no one has properly dissected the intertwined lives of the second and sixth (father and son) presidents. John and John Quincy Adams were brilliant, prickly politicians and arguably the most independently minded among leaders of the founding generation. Distrustful of blind allegiance to a political party, they brought a healthy skepticism of a brand-new system of government to the country's first 50 years. They were unpopular for their fears of the potential for demagoguery lurking in democracy, and--in a twist that predicted the turn of twenty-first century politics--they warned against, but were unable to stop, the seductive appeal of political celebrities Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. In a bold recasting of the Adamses' historical roles, The Problem of Democracy is a major critique of the ways in which their prophetic warnings have been systematically ignored over the centuries. It's also an intimate family drama that brings out the torment and personal hurt caused by the gritty conduct of early American politics. Burstein and Isenberg make sense of the presidents' somewhat iconoclastic, highly creative engagement with America's political and social realities. By taking the temperature of American democracy, from its heated origins through multiple upheavals, the authors reveal the dangers and weaknesses that have been present since the beginning. They provide a clear-eyed look at a decoy democracy that masks the reality of elite rule while remaining open, since the days of George Washington, to a very undemocratic result in the formation of a cult surrounding the person of an elected leader.

Author: Christina Lamb
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140143348
Category : Pakistan
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description

Author: David Graeber
Publisher: Doubleday UK
ISBN: 081299356X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Explores the idea of democracy, its current state of crisis, and its potential as a tool for change, sharing historical perspectives on the effectiveness of democratic uprisings in various times and cultures.

Author: Suzanne Mettler
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 9781250244420
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
An urgent, historically-grounded take on the four major factors that undermine American democracy, and what we can do to address them. While many Americans despair of the current state of U.S. politics, most assume that our system of government and democracy itself are invulnerable to decay. Yet when we examine the past, we find that to the contrary, the United States has undergone repeated crises of democracy, from the earliest days of the republic to the present. In The Four Threats, Robert C. Lieberman and Suzanne Mettler explore five historical episodes when democracy in the United States was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound, even fatal, damage to the American democratic experiment, and on occasion antidemocratic forces have prevailed. From this history, four distinct characteristics of democratic disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power – alone or in combination – have threatened the survival of the republic, but it has survived, so far. What is unique, and alarming, about the present moment is that all four conditions are present in American politics today. This formidable convergence marks the contemporary era as an especially grave moment for democracy in the United States. But history provides a valuable repository from which contemporary Americans can draw lessons about how democracy was eventually strengthened — or in some cases weakened — in the past. By revisiting how earlier generations of Americans faced threats to the principles enshrined in the Constitution, we can see the promise and the peril that have led us to the present and chart a path toward repairing our civic fabric and renewing democracy.

Author: Sheldon S. Wolin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691178488
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level. Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come. Now with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges, Democracy Incorporated remains an essential work for understanding the state of democracy in America.

Author: Zizi Papacharissi
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030025864X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
What do ordinary citizens really want from their governments? Democracy has long been considered an ideal state of governance. What if it’s not? Perhaps it is not the end goal but, rather, a transition stage to something better. Drawing on original interviews conducted with citizens of more than thirty countries, Zizi Papacharissi explores what democracy is, what it means to be a citizen, and what can be done to enhance governance. As she probes the ways governments can better serve their citizens and evolve in positive ways, Papacharissi gives a voice to everyday people, whose ideas and experiences of capitalism, media, and education can help shape future governing practices. This book expands on the well-known difficulties of realizing the intimacy of democracy in a global world—the “democratic paradox”—and presents a concrete vision of how communications technologies can be harnessed to implement representative equality, information equality, and civic literacy.

Author: Rolf Gollob
Publisher: Council of Europe
ISBN: 9789287163325
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This is a manual for teachers in Education for Democratic Citizenship (EDC) and Human Rights Education (HRE), EDC/HRE textbook editors and curriculum developers. Nine teaching units of approximately four lessons each focus on key concepts of EDC/HRE. The lesson plans give step-by-step instructions and include student handouts and background information for teachers. In this way, the manual is suited for trainees or beginners in the teaching profession and teachers who are receiving in-service teacher training in EDC/HRE. The complete manual provides a full school year's curriculum for lower secondary classes, but as each unit is also complete in itself, the manual allows great flexibility in use. The objective of EDC/HRE is the active citizen who is willing and able to participate in the democratic community. Therefore EDC/HRE strongly emphasize action and task-based learning.