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Author: Nicholas T. Davis
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472220381
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Democracy’s Meanings challenges conventional wisdom regarding how the public thinks about and evaluates democracy. Mining both political theory and more than 75 years of public opinion data, the book argues that Americans think about democracy in ways that go beyond voting or elected representation. Instead, citizens have rich and substantive views about the material conditions that democracy should produce, which draw from their beliefs about equality, fairness, and justice. The authors construct a typology of views about democracy. Procedural views of democracy take a minimalistic quality. While voting and fair treatment are important to this vision of democracy, ideas about equality are mostly limited to civil liberties. In contrast, social views of democracy incorporate both civil and economic equality; according to people with these views, democracy ought to meet the basic social and material needs of citizens. Complementing these two groups are moderate and indifferent views about democracy. While moderate views sit somewhere in between procedural and social perspectives regarding the role of democracy in producing social and economic equality, indifferent views of democracy involve disaffection toward it. For a small group of apathetic citizens, democracy is an ambiguous and ill-defined concept.
Author: Nicholas T. Davis
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472220381
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Get Book
Book Description
Democracy’s Meanings challenges conventional wisdom regarding how the public thinks about and evaluates democracy. Mining both political theory and more than 75 years of public opinion data, the book argues that Americans think about democracy in ways that go beyond voting or elected representation. Instead, citizens have rich and substantive views about the material conditions that democracy should produce, which draw from their beliefs about equality, fairness, and justice. The authors construct a typology of views about democracy. Procedural views of democracy take a minimalistic quality. While voting and fair treatment are important to this vision of democracy, ideas about equality are mostly limited to civil liberties. In contrast, social views of democracy incorporate both civil and economic equality; according to people with these views, democracy ought to meet the basic social and material needs of citizens. Complementing these two groups are moderate and indifferent views about democracy. While moderate views sit somewhere in between procedural and social perspectives regarding the role of democracy in producing social and economic equality, indifferent views of democracy involve disaffection toward it. For a small group of apathetic citizens, democracy is an ambiguous and ill-defined concept.
Author: Vincent Ostrom
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472084562
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Considers the social requirements for a thriving democracy
Author: Nicholas T. Davis
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472133128
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
How do the people who make up American democracy view and judge its process?
Author: Hélène Landemore
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691212392
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
To the ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in public and debating laws set by a randomly selected assembly of several hundred citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings, democracy meant meeting every summer in a field to discuss issues until consensus was reached. Our contemporary representative democracies are very different. Modern parliaments are gated and guarded, and it seems as if only certain people are welcome. Diagnosing what is wrong with representative government and aiming to recover some of the openness of ancient democracies, Open Democracy presents a new paradigm of democracy. Supporting a fresh nonelectoral understanding of democratic representation, Hélène Landemore demonstrates that placing ordinary citizens, rather than elites, at the heart of democratic power is not only the true meaning of a government of, by, and for the people, but also feasible and, more than ever, urgently needed. -- Cover page 4.
Author: Frederic Charles Schaffer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501718398
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
Frederic C. Schaffer challenges the assumption often made by American scholars that democracy has been achieved in foreign countries when criteria such as free elections are met. Elections, he argues, often have cultural underpinnings that are invisible to outsiders. To examine grassroots understandings of democratic institutions and political concepts, Schaffer conducted fieldwork in Senegal, a mostly Islamic and agrarian country with a long history of electoral politics. Schaffer discovered that ideas of "demokaraasi" held by Wolof-speakers often reflect concerns about collective security. Many Senegalese see voting as less a matter of choosing leaders than of reinforcing community ties that may be called upon in times of crisis.By looking carefully at language, Schaffer demonstrates that institutional arrangements do not necessarily carry the same meaning in different cultural contexts. Democracy in Translation asks how social scientists should investigate the functioning of democratic institutions in cultures dissimilar from their own, and raises larger issues about the nature of democracy, the universality of democratic ideals, and the practice of cross-cultural research.
Author: Roslyn Fuller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1783605448
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
Democracy does not deliver on the things we have assumed are its natural outcomes. This, coupled with a growing sense of malaise in both new and established democracies forms the basis to the assertion made by some, that these are not democracies at all. Through considerable, impressive empirical analysis of a variety of voting methods, across twenty different nations, Roslyn Fuller presents the data that makes this contention indisputable. Proving that the party which forms the government rarely receives the majority of the popular vote, that electoral systems regularly produce manufactured majorities and that the better funded side invariably wins such contests in both elections and referenda, Fuller's findings challenge the most fundamental elements of both national politics and broader society. Beast and Gods argues for a return to democracy as perceived by the ancient Athenians. Boldly arguing for the necessity of the Aristotelian assumption that citizens are agents whose wishes and aims can be attained through participation in politics, and through an examination of what “goods” are provided by democracy, Fuller offers a powerful challenge to the contemporary liberal view that there are no "goods" in politics, only individual citizens seeking to fulfil their particular interests.
Author: Norman Abjorensen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538120747
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 551
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Book Description
Democracy is easy to talk about but hard to define in other than broad generalizations; its history is a long, complex, and contested subject. What this volume seeks to do is to explore the general evolution of political and social thinking that would eventually coalesce into what we now know as democracy, for all its imperfections and shortcomings. The question of just why some societies evolved into a democratic trajectory and others did not continues to engage the interest of historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists. Much conjecture surrounds the rise of certain elements we now recognize if not as democratic, then proto-democratic, such as collective decision-making, constraints on the exercise of power and a degree of accountability of the ruler to the ruled. If democracy in the sense of “rule by the people” has two essential qualities – rule by the majority and the equal treatment of free citizens - then its origins, however feeble, are to be found in these early examples of government. Historical Dictionary of Democracy contains a chronology, an introduction, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about democracy.
Author: William Fletcher Russell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Democracy
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
Author: Steven Levitsky
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1524762946
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Time • Foreign Affairs • WBUR • Paste Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved. Praise for How Democracies Die “What we desperately need is a sober, dispassionate look at the current state of affairs. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two of the most respected scholars in the field of democracy studies, offer just that.”—The Washington Post “Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.”—Ezra Klein, Vox “If you only read one book for the rest of the year, read How Democracies Die. . . .This is not a book for just Democrats or Republicans. It is a book for all Americans. It is nonpartisan. It is fact based. It is deeply rooted in history. . . . The best commentary on our politics, no contest.”—Michael Morrell, former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (via Twitter) “A smart and deeply informed book about the ways in which democracy is being undermined in dozens of countries around the world, and in ways that are perfectly legal.”—Fareed Zakaria, CNN
Author: Jessica Lynn Graham
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520293754
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
This book offers a historical analysis of one of the most striking and dramatic transformations to take place in Brazil and the United States during the twentieth century—the redefinition of the concepts of nation and democracy in racial terms. The multilateral political debates that occurred between 1930 and 1945 pushed and pulled both states towards more racially inclusive political ideals and nationalisms. Both countries utilized cultural production to transmit these racial political messages. At times working collaboratively, Brazilian and U.S. officials deployed the concept of “racial democracy” as a national security strategy, one meant to suppress the existential threats perceived to be posed by World War II and by the political agendas of communists, fascists, and blacks. Consequently, official racial democracy was limited in its ability to address racial inequities in the United States and Brazil. Shifting the Meaning of Democracy helps to explain the historical roots of a contemporary phenomenon: the coexistence of widespread antiracist ideals with enduring racial inequality.
