Activist Origins of Political Ambition

Activist Origins of Political Ambition PDF Author: Keith Weghorst
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316519929
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
A first-of-its-kind study of legislative candidacy in electoral autocracies in Africa showing how civic activism translates into opposition ambition.

Activist Origins of Political Ambition

Activist Origins of Political Ambition PDF Author: Keith Weghorst
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316519929
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
A first-of-its-kind study of legislative candidacy in electoral autocracies in Africa showing how civic activism translates into opposition ambition.

Activist Origins of Political Ambition

Activist Origins of Political Ambition PDF Author: Keith Weghorst
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009022458
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Why do people run for office with opposition parties in electoral authoritarian regimes, where the risks of running are high, and the chances of victory are bleak? In Activist Origins of Political Ambition, Keith Weghorst offers a theory that candidacy decisions are set in motion in early life events and that civic activism experiences and careers in civil society organizations funnel aspirants towards opposition candidacy in electoral authoritarian regimes. The book also adapts existing explanations of candidacy decisions derived from leading democracies that can be applied to electoral authoritarian contexts. The mixed-methods research design features an in-depth study of Tanzania using original survey data, sequence methods, archival research, and qualitative data combined with an analysis of legislators across authoritarian and democratic regimes in Africa. A first-of-its kind study, the book's account of the origins of candidacy motivations offers contributions to its study in autocracies, as well as in leading democracies and the United States.

Becoming a Candidate

Becoming a Candidate PDF Author: Jennifer L. Lawless
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139504363
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Becoming a Candidate: Political Ambition and the Decision to Run for Office explores the factors that drive political ambition at the earliest stages. Using data from a comprehensive survey of thousands of eligible candidates, Jennifer L. Lawless systematically investigates what compels certain citizens to pursue elective positions and others to recoil at the notion. Lawless assesses personal factors, such as race, gender and family dynamics, that affect an eligible candidate's likelihood of considering a run for office. She also focuses on eligible candidates' professional lives and attitudes toward the political system.

Activist Archives

Activist Archives PDF Author: Doreen Lee
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374099
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
In Activist Archives Doreen Lee tells the origins, experiences, and legacy of the radical Indonesian student movement that helped end the thirty-two-year dictatorship in May 1998. Lee situates the revolt as the most recent manifestation of student activists claiming a political and historical inheritance passed down by earlier generations of politicized youth. Combining historical and ethnographic analysis of "Generation 98," Lee offers rich depictions of the generational structures, nationalist sentiments, and organizational and private spaces that bound these activists together. She examines the ways the movement shaped new and youthful ways of looking, seeing, and being—found in archival documents from the 1980s and 1990s; the connections between politics and place; narratives of state violence; activists' experimental lifestyles; and the uneven development of democratic politics on and off the street. Lee illuminates how the interaction between official history, collective memory, and performance came to define youth citizenship and resistance in Indonesia’s transition to the post-Suharto present.

Electoral Politics in Africa since 1990

Electoral Politics in Africa since 1990 PDF Author: Jaimie Bleck
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107162084
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
First comprehensive analysis of electoral politics in Sub-Saharan Africa since the democratic transitions of the early 1990s.

Wealth, Power, and Authoritarian Institutions

Wealth, Power, and Authoritarian Institutions PDF Author: Michaela Collord
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192667351
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Through an analysis of the recent political history of Tanzania and Uganda, Wealth, Power, and Authoritarian Institutions offers a novel explanation of why authoritarian parties and legislatures vary in strength, and why this variation matters. Michaela Collord elaborates a view of authoritarian political institutions as both reflecting and magnifying elite power dynamics. While there are many sources of elite power, the book centres on material power. It outlines how diverse trajectories of state-led capitalist development engender differing patterns of wealth accumulation and elite contestation across regimes. These differences, in turn, influence institutional landscapes. Where accumulation is more closely controlled by state and party leaders, as was true in Tanzania until economic liberalization in the 1980s, rival factions remain subdued. Ruling parties can then consolidate relatively strong institutional structures, and parliament remains marginal. Conversely, where a class of private wealth accumulators expands, as occurred in Tanzania after the 1980s and in Uganda after the National Resistance Movement took power in 1986, rival factions can more easily form, simultaneously eroding party institutions and encouraging greater legislative strength. Collord uses this analysis to reassess the significance of a stronger legislature. She considers its influence on distributive politics, both regressive and progressive. She also considers its relation to democratization, particularly in a context of broader liberalizing reforms. The book ultimately encourages a closer examination of how would-be democratic institutions interact with an underlying power distribution, shaping in whose interests they operate. Oxford Studies in African Politics and International Relations is a series for scholars and students working on African politics and International Relations and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on contemporary developments in African political science, political economy, and International Relations, such as electoral politics, democratization, decentralization, gender and political representation, the political impact of natural resources, the dynamics and consequences of conflict, comparative political thought, and the nature of the continent's engagement with the East and West. Comparative and mixed methods work is particularly encouraged. Case studies are welcomed but should demonstrate the broader theoretical and empirical implications of the study and its wider relevance to contemporary debates. The focus of the series is on sub-Saharan Africa, although proposals that explain how the region engages with North Africa and other parts of the world are of interest. General Editors Nic Cheeseman, Peace Medie, and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira.

Gentle Lady Samia Suluhu Hassan: Tanzania's first female president

Gentle Lady Samia Suluhu Hassan: Tanzania's first female president PDF Author: John Ndembwike
Publisher: New Africa Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
This work is about Samia Suluhu Hassan, Tanzania's first female president. She was also Tanzania's first female vice president. And she was the only female president in Africa when she went into office. She is also the third female president in Africa with executive powers. One of the biggest challenges Tanzania faces under the leadership of President Samia Suluhu Hassan is the quest for true democracy. The country is at the crossroads. It either pursues democracy in the full practical – not theoretical – sense or it abandons the goal and maintains the status quo, reversing whatever gains that have been made in the past in pursuit of this noble goal. The work looks at the central and critical role Mama Samia, as she is known in Tanzania and sometimes beyond, is destined to play in the quest for this new dispensation. There are strident and persistent demands by the opposition parties for a complete overhaul of the system. They demand a new constitution. There is an imperative need to establish an independent electoral commission, level the playing field to enable the opposition to compete fairly and effectively against the ruling party which has been in power since the country won independence more than 60 years ago. Even after multiparty elections were introduced in 1995 after 30 years of one-party rule since 1965, Tanzania has not achieved full democracy. It remains a de facto one-party state. For the first time in the country's history in the post-colonial era, Tanzania has a leader, Mama Samia, who has promised to undertake fundamental changes and work with the opposition to transform the country into a truly democratic society. She has promised to level the playing field and has stated that she will make sure opposition parties are able to compete fairly and effectively against the ruling party even if that will cost her the presidency in the next election in 2025. No other Tanzanian president has made that commitment before, since the introduction of multiparty politics in 1992, or has even implied – let alone admitted – that there is no level playing field in the political arena. They all have claimed there is a level playing field to enable opposition parties to win elections against the ruling party and when they lose they lose fairly. If President Samia does what she has promised to do, she is going to be the most transformative figure in the history of Tanzania besides the founding father of the nation Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere who led the struggle for the independence of Tanganyika and led the country to be the first in East Africa to attain sovereign status. She will be remembered as the leader who gave Tanzania a new constitution, reduced the power of the presidency at the expense of her own ruling party as demanded by the opposition, established an independent electoral commission, levelled the playing field to enable opposition parties to compete fairly and effectively against the ruling party without any interference by the government to block them from doing so, and transformed the country into a full democracy. I have described her as “The Gentle Lady” but also as someone with steely determination to get things done. She also likes to get things done on consensus basis, an approach that has won her support in the opposition camp, a rare achievement among leaders of the ruling party who prefer to win or get things done on their own terms and often excluding the opposition. In spite of her softness, she is destined – as a steely character – to shake the country to its foundation for a complete overhaul of the system and radically transform the political landscape into one that accommodates all, if she does what she has said she is going to do, and if she works together with the opposition to achieve those goals, all of which are non-partisan, transcending narrow political interests in the best interest of the nation. She will be remembered as “the mother of democracy” in Tanzania. But she will also need the support of political heavyweights and others in her own party to implement her decisions and fulfill her agenda and transform the country into a “new nation” with a solid democratic foundation. It has been a long journey, starting almost thirty years ago in 1995 when the country had multiparty elections and entered a new era of multiparty politics – not democracy – in an attempt to achieve freedom and equality in the political arena by guaranteeing the right of every individual to express his/her views without fear of being muzzled, and by levelling the playing field to enable opposition parties to compete fairly and effectively against the ruling party which has been in power since independence. The goal has been elusive mainly because of government intervention to thwart the process in order to enable the ruling party to perpetuate itself in power: the ruling party and the government are one and the same thing in Tanzania and have always been. The refusal and unwillingness of national leaders to level the playing field in order to achieve genuine democracy has, unfortunately, somewhat been sanctioned and legitimised by the opposition parties themselves because of their refusal to unite and form a cohesive bloc as one strong party, with nationwide appeal, to effectively challenge the ruling party which has enormous advantages of mobilising support among the people. It has had the opportunity and the experience to build and consolidate its base across the nation all the way down to the grassroots level for decades since the end of colonial rule. In order to provide a counterweight against such a behemoth, there is an imperative need for opposition parties to unite and form one large party that can match the ruling party in mobilising support nationwide. That is the next challenge for the opposition in its quest for true democracy. Otherwise be prepared to maintain the status quo and accept its legitimacy validated by the ruling party's dominance of the political landscape – in fact across the sociopolitical and economic spectrum – because it is a dominance derived from electoral mandate as CCM continues to win elections without credible challenge to its supremacy at the polls.

How Party Activism Survives

How Party Activism Survives PDF Author: Pérez Bentancur Pérez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110848526X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Explores the value of an organization-centered approach to understanding parties and their role in democratic representation.

Why America Needs a Left

Why America Needs a Left PDF Author: Eli Zaretsky
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745656560
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
The United States today cries out for a robust, self-respecting, intellectually sophisticated left, yet the very idea of a left appears to have been discredited. In this brilliant new book, Eli Zaretsky rethinks the idea by examining three key moments in American history: the Civil War, the New Deal and the range of New Left movements in the 1960s and after including the civil rights movement, the women's movement and gay liberation.In each period, he argues, the active involvement of the left - especially its critical interaction with mainstream liberalism - proved indispensable. American liberalism, as represented by the Democratic Party, is necessarily spineless and ineffective without a left. Correspondingly, without a strong liberal center, the left becomes sectarian, authoritarian, and worse. Written in an accessible way for the general reader and the undergraduate student, this book provides a fresh perspective on American politics and political history. It has often been said that the idea of a left originated in the French Revolution and is distinctively European; Zaretsky argues, by contrast, that America has always had a vibrant and powerful left. And he shows that in those critical moments when the country returns to itself, it is on its left/liberal bases that it comes to feel most at home.

Taiwan

Taiwan PDF Author: Denny Roy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780801440700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
For centuries, various great powers have both exploited and benefited Taiwan, shaping its multiple and frequently contradictory identities. Offering a narrative of the island's political history, the author contends that it is best understood as a continuous struggle for security.