Author: Kristina Smock
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231126735
Category : Community development, Urban
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
In cities across the US, grass-roots organizations are working to revitalize popular participation in disenfranchised communities by bringing ordinary people into public life. This book examines the techniques used to achieve these goals.
Author: Steven Friedman
Publisher: Wits University Press
ISBN: 1776144589
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
Argues that South Africans, like everyone else, need democracy for a more equal society What are democracies meant to do? And how does one know when one is a democratic state? These incisive questions and more by leading political scientist, Steven Friedman, underlie this robust enquiry into what democracy means for South Africa post 1994. Democracy is often viewed through a lens reflecting Western understanding. New democracies are compared to idealized notions by which the system is said to operate in the global North. The democracies of Western Europe and North America are understood to be the finished product and all others are assessed by how far they have progressed towards approximating this model. Power in Action persuasively argues against this stereotype. Friedman asserts that democracies can only work when every adult has an equal say in the public decisions that affect them.Democracy is achieved not by adopting idealized models derived from other societies–rather, it is the product of collective action by citizens who claim the right to be heard not only through public protest action, but also through the conscious exercise of influence on public and private power holders. Viewing democracy in this way challenges us to develop a deeper understanding of democracy’s challenges and in so doing to ensure that more citizens can claim a say over more decisions in society.
Author: Benjamin I. Page
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022672994X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
“Important and riveting . . . The solution isn’t to redistribute wealth from the have-mores to the have-lesses. It’s to redistribute political power to everyone.” —Robert B. Reich America faces daunting problems—stagnant wages, high health care costs, neglected schools, deteriorating public services. How did we get here? Through decades of dysfunctional government. In Democracy in America? veteran political observers Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens marshal an unprecedented array of evidence to show that while other countries have responded to a rapidly changing economy by helping people who’ve been left behind, the United States has failed to do so. Instead, we have actually exacerbated inequality, enriching corporations and the wealthy while leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves. What’s the solution? More democracy. More opportunities for citizens to shape what their government does. To repair our democracy, Page and Gilens argue, we must change the way we choose candidates and conduct our elections, reform our governing institutions, and curb the power of money in politics. By doing so, we can reduce polarization and gridlock, address pressing challenges, and enact policies that truly reflect the interests of average Americans. Updated with new information, this book lays out a set of proposals that would boost citizen participation, curb the power of money, and democratize the House and Senate. “Brilliant, indispensable, and highly accessible.” —New York Journal of Books
Author: McGraw-Hill Education
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
ISBN: 9780078600531
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Meet the needs of all students with an engaging narrative, high-interest graphics, and outstanding teacher support.
Author: Vera Schatten Coelho
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848139152
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Mobilizing for Democracy is an in-depth study into how ordinary citizens and their organizations mobilize to deepen democracy. Featuring a collection of new empirical case studies from Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this important new book illustrates how forms of political mobilization, such as protests, social participation, activism, litigation and lobbying, engage with the formal institutions of representative democracy in ways that are core to the development of democratic politics. No other volume has brought together examples from such a broad Southern spectrum and covering such a diversity of actors: rural and urban dwellers, transnational activists, religious groups, politicians and social leaders. The cases illuminate the crucial contribution that citizen mobilization makes to democratization and the building of state institutions, and reflect the uneasy relationship between citizens and the institutions that are designed to foster their political participation.
Author: Frank Hendriks
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019957278X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Vital Democracy outlines an innovative new theory of democracy in action.
Author: David de la Pena
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610918479
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
How can we design places that fulfill urgent needs of the community, achieve environmental justice, and inspire long-term stewardship? By bringing community members to the table with designers to collectively create vibrant, important places in cities and neighborhoods. For decades, participatory design practices have helped enliven neighborhoods and promote cultural understanding. Yet, many designers still rely on the same techniques that were developed in the 1950s and 60s. These approaches offer predictability, but hold waning promise for addressing current and future design challenges. Design as Democracy is written to reinvigorate democratic design, providing inspiration, techniques, and case stories for a wide range of contexts. Edited by six leading practitioners and academics in the field of participatory design, with nearly 50 contributors from around the world, it offers fresh insights for creating meaningful dialogue between designers and communities and for transforming places with justice and democracy in mind.
Author: Spoma Jovanovic
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 161075509X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
On November 3, 1979, five protest marchers in Greensboro, North Carolina, were shot and killed by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. There were no police present, but television crews captured the shootings on video. Despite two criminal trials, none of the killers ever served time for their crimes, exposing what many believed to be the inadequacy of judicial, political, and economic systems in the United States. Twenty-five years later, in 2004, Greensboro residents, inspired by post-apartheid South Africa, initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to take public testimony and examine the causes, sequence of events, and consequences of the massacre. The TRC was to be a process and a tool by which citizens could feel confident about the truth of the city's history in order to reconcile divergent understandings of past and current city values, and it became the foundation for the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the United States. Spoma Jovanovic, who worked alongside other community members to document the grassroots effort to convene the first TRC in the United States, provides a resource and case study of how citizens in one community used their TRC as a way to understand the past and conceive the future. This book preserves the historical significance of a people's effort to seek truth and work for reconciliation, shows a variety of discourse models for other communities to use in seeking to redress past harms, and demonstrates the power of community action to promote participatory democracy.
Author: N/A Mcgraw-Hill Education
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780078909085
Category : Civics
Languages : en
Pages : 898
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Book Description
Author: Anne Wallace Sharp
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
ISBN: 142050908X
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114
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Book Description
Author Anne Wallace Sharp describes the events that led up to and followed the historic Freedom Rides of 1961. The experiences of African Americans in the Jim Crow South, the stark inequality enforced with segregation laws, and the struggles of the budding civil rights movement are all discussed. Sharp recounts the experiences shared by the Freedom Riders as they faced oppression and violence, and describes how this event changed the course of American history.
