Politics in the Age of Austerity

Politics in the Age of Austerity PDF Author: Wolfgang Streeck
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745670083
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
In a world of increasing austerity measures, democratic politics comes under pressure. With the need to consolidate budgets and to accommodate financial markets, the responsiveness of governments to voters declines. However, democracy depends on choice. Citizens must be able to influence the course of government through elections and if a change in government cannot translate into different policies, democracy is incapacitated. Many mature democracies are approaching this situation as they confront fiscal crisis. For almost three decades, OECD countries have - in fits and starts - run deficits and accumulated debt. As a result, an ever smaller part of government revenue is available today for discretionary spending and social investment and whichever party comes into office will find its hands tied by past decisions. The current financial and fiscal crisis has exacerbated the long-term shrinking government discretion; projects for political change have lost credibility. Many citizens are aware of this situation: they turn away from party politics and stay at home on Election Day. With contributions from leading scholars in the forefront of sociology, politics and economics, this timely book will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences as well as general readers.

Politics in the Age of Austerity

Politics in the Age of Austerity PDF Author: Wolfgang Streeck
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745670083
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a world of increasing austerity measures, democratic politics comes under pressure. With the need to consolidate budgets and to accommodate financial markets, the responsiveness of governments to voters declines. However, democracy depends on choice. Citizens must be able to influence the course of government through elections and if a change in government cannot translate into different policies, democracy is incapacitated. Many mature democracies are approaching this situation as they confront fiscal crisis. For almost three decades, OECD countries have - in fits and starts - run deficits and accumulated debt. As a result, an ever smaller part of government revenue is available today for discretionary spending and social investment and whichever party comes into office will find its hands tied by past decisions. The current financial and fiscal crisis has exacerbated the long-term shrinking government discretion; projects for political change have lost credibility. Many citizens are aware of this situation: they turn away from party politics and stay at home on Election Day. With contributions from leading scholars in the forefront of sociology, politics and economics, this timely book will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences as well as general readers.

The Age of Austerity

The Age of Austerity PDF Author: Thomas Byrne Edsall
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385535201
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
One of our most prescient political observers provides a sobering account of how pitched battles over scarce resources will increasingly define American politics in the coming years—and how we might avoid, or at least mitigate, the damage from these ideological and economic battles. In a matter of just three years, a bitter struggle over limited resources has enveloped political discourse at every level in the United States. Fights between haves and have-nots over health care, unemployment benefits, funding for mortgage write-downs, economic stimulus legislation—and, at the local level, over cuts in police protection, garbage collection, and in the number of teachers—have dominated the debate. Elected officials are being forced to make zero-sum choices—or worse, choices with no winners. Resource competition between Democrats and Republicans has left each side determined to protect what it has at the expense of the other. The major issues of the next few years—long-term deficit reduction; entitlement reform, notably of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; major cuts in defense spending; and difficulty in financing a continuation of American international involvement—suggest that your-gain-is-my-loss politics will inevitably intensify.

Contentious Episodes in the Age of Austerity

Contentious Episodes in the Age of Austerity PDF Author: Abel Bojar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316519015
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Provides researchers with a novel methodological tool to study interactions between governments, challengers, and third-party actors.

The Age of Austerity

The Age of Austerity PDF Author: Thomas J. Schoenbaum
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1781951454
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This provocative look at the global financial crisis argues that the United States, the European Union and Japan have intentionally and unwittingly adopted wrong-headed economic policies in a futile attempt to deal with sovereign debt resulting from the global financial crisis. It offers persuasive evidence of how the politics of austerity fail to encourage economic recovery, and proposes instead a number of alternative ideas and solutions. The book begins with a detailed breakdown of the financial crisis and the government response in the United States, with particular focus on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The author then puts forth a basic three-part plan calling for (1) fundamental tax and entitlement reform; (2) massive economic stimulus in the form of public and private investment to modernize the countryÍs aging infrastructures; and (3) mortgage relief to revitalize the nationÍs housing markets. The book concludes with specific policy proposals designed to achieve these goals and return the US economy to a state of full employment and robust economic growth. This timely and insightful volume will appeal to students and scholars of economics, public policy and finance, as well as anyone with an interest in the recent economic history of the United States.

Street Politics in the Age of Austerity

Street Politics in the Age of Austerity PDF Author: Marcos Ancelovici
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789089647634
Category : Demonstrations
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This collection is designed to offer a comparative analysis of street-level protest movements, setting them in international, socio-economic, and cross-cultural perspective in order to help us understand why movements emerge, what they do, how they spread, and how they fit into both local and worldwide historical contexts.

Composition in the Age of Austerity

Composition in the Age of Austerity PDF Author: Nancy Welch
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 160732444X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
"How neoliberal political economy shapes writing assessments, curricula, teacher agency, program administration, and funding distribution. How neoliberal political economy dictates direction of scholarship, because the economic and political agenda shaping the terms of work, the methods, and the ways of assessing writing also shapes directions of scholarship"--Provided by publisher.

The Austerity State

The Austerity State PDF Author: Stephen McBride
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487521952
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
"This volume focuses on the state's role in managing the fall-out from the global economic and financial crisis since 2008. For a brief moment, roughly from 2008-2010, governments and central banks appeared to borrow from Keynes to save the global economy. The contributors, however, take the view that to see those stimulus measures as "Keynesian" is a misinterpretation. Rather, neoliberalism demonstrated considerable resiliency despite its responsibility for the deep and prolonged crisis. The "austerian" analysis of the crisis is--historical, ignores its deeper roots, and rests upon a triumph of discourse involving blame-shifting from the under-regulated private sector to public or sovereign debt--for which the public authorities are responsible."--

Debtors' Prison

Debtors' Prison PDF Author: Robert Kuttner
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307959813
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
One of our foremost economic thinkers challenges a cherished tenet of today’s financial orthodoxy: that spending less, refusing to forgive debt, and shrinking government—“austerity”—is the solution to a persisting economic crisis like ours or Europe’s, now in its fifth year. Since the collapse of September 2008, the conversation about economic recovery has centered on the question of debt: whether we have too much of it, whose debt to forgive, and how to cut the deficit. These questions dominated the sound bites of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the fiscal-cliff debates, and the perverse policies of the European Union. Robert Kuttner makes the most powerful argument to date that these are the wrong questions and that austerity is the wrong answer. Blending economics with historical contrasts of effective debt relief and punitive debt enforcement, he makes clear that universal belt-tightening, as a prescription for recession, defies economic logic. And while the public debt gets most of the attention, it is private debts that crashed the economy and are sandbagging the recovery—mortgages, student loans, consumer borrowing to make up for lagging wages, speculative shortfalls incurred by banks. As Kuttner observes, corporations get to use bankruptcy to walk away from debts. Homeowners and small nations don’t. Thus, we need more public borrowing and investment to revive a depressed economy, and more forgiveness and reform of the overhang of past debts. In making his case, Kuttner uncovers the double standards in the politics of debt, from Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe’s campaign for debt forgiveness in the seventeenth century to the two world wars and Bretton Woods. Just as debtors’ prisons once prevented individuals from surmounting their debts and resuming productive life, austerity measures shackle, rather than restore, economic growth—as the weight of past debt crushes the economy’s future potential. Above all, Kuttner shows how austerity serves only the interest of creditors—the very bankers and financial elites whose actions precipitated the collapse. Lucid, authoritative, provocative—a book that will shape the economic conversation and the search for new solutions.

Policing in an Age of Austerity

Policing in an Age of Austerity PDF Author: Michael Brogden
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415691893
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In the current context of financial retrenchment on public-sector budgets, public policing in England and Wales today faces the prospect of dramatic change. While the question of role and function has been the bedrock of classical sociological theorizing on police, this book grounds such theorising in explicating how British policing has arisen through a schismatic process, why it is in a present mess, and what it should be doing in the future The central themes of this critical text are An analysis of the congeries of roles and functions that our public police in England and Wales currently undertake and how they got there An examination of the effect of arbitrary reduction in police services, including a reading of policing politics in an age of austerity A comparative critique of the British Brand of Policing The development of a normative manifesto for the future of British Policing. This book will be essential for reading for students, researchers and academics alike in criminology, police studies and public and social policy.

Resistance in the Age of Austerity

Resistance in the Age of Austerity PDF Author: Owen Worth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780323379
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
In November 1999 the first protests associated with the 'anti-globalisation movement' took place in Seattle, and came to be seen as the starting point for globalised resistance to neoliberal capitalism. Despite initial optimism, the following years have seen little progress in formulating a coherent alternative to neoliberalism, a failure that has become particularly poignant in the aftermath of the recent credit crisis. Now, the neoliberal mandate that appeared to be in 'crisis' in just 2008 has reinvented itself through the guise of a new 'era of austerity'. In this timely book, Worth assesses the growing diversity of resistance to neoliberalism - progressive, nationalist and religious - and argues that, troublingly, the more reactionary alternatives to globalisation currently provide just as coherent a base for building opposition as those associated with the traditional 'left-wing' anti-globalisation movements. From the shortcomings of the Occupy movement to the rise of Radical Islam, the re-emergence of the far-right in Western Europe to the startling impact of the Tea Party in the US - Worth shows that while a progressive alternative is possible, it cannot be taken for granted.