The Limits to Citizen Power

The Limits to Citizen Power PDF Author: Victor Albert
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN: 9780745336176
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"After Brazil's transition to democracy in 1985, a number of progressive actors, including a new political party -- the Workers' Party -- championed a raft of participatory reforms. Today, these reforms have garnered global attention for their effectiveness at combating inequality, encouraging active citizenship and reshaping state-society relations. However, no democratising project can entirely cast aside the existing state structures that pattern and give shape to political life. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, Victor Albert provides a critical analysis of citizen participation in Santo André, in the region of Greater Sao Paulo where the Workers' Party was founded, by exploring the challenges participants face as they take part in institutions pervaded by the administrative culture of the state."--Back cover.

The Limits to Citizen Power

The Limits to Citizen Power PDF Author: Victor Albert
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN: 9780745336176
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"After Brazil's transition to democracy in 1985, a number of progressive actors, including a new political party -- the Workers' Party -- championed a raft of participatory reforms. Today, these reforms have garnered global attention for their effectiveness at combating inequality, encouraging active citizenship and reshaping state-society relations. However, no democratising project can entirely cast aside the existing state structures that pattern and give shape to political life. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, Victor Albert provides a critical analysis of citizen participation in Santo André, in the region of Greater Sao Paulo where the Workers' Party was founded, by exploring the challenges participants face as they take part in institutions pervaded by the administrative culture of the state."--Back cover.

The Limits of Presidential Power

The Limits of Presidential Power PDF Author: Lisa Manheim
Publisher: Manheim & Watts, LLC
ISBN: 9780999698808
Category : Executive power
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This one-of-a-kind guide provides a crash course in the laws governing the President of the United States. In an engaging and accessible style, two law professors explain the principles that inform everything from President Washington's disagreements with Congress to President Trump's struggles with the courts, and more. Timely and to the point, this guide provides the essential information every informed civic participant needs to know about the laws that govern the president-and what those laws mean for those who want to make their voices heard.

Citizen Power

Citizen Power PDF Author: Harry S. Pozycki
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978820739
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
CITIZEN POWER gives all Americans the know how to become no-blame problem solvers and be part of what is emerging as a new model for a citizen driven national public service

A New Weave of Power, People and Politics

A New Weave of Power, People and Politics PDF Author: Lisa VeneKlasen
Publisher: Practical Action Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This field manual provides a well-tested approach for promoting citizen participation. It breaks down the traditional boxes separating human rights, rule of law, development, and governance, and reconnects them in order to create an integrated approach to rights-based political empowerment. A New Weave of Power, People & Politics combines concrete and practical 'action steps' with a sound theoretical foundation to help users understand the process of advocacy planning and implementation. This is an 'Action Guide' that builds on the authors' 50 years of combined experience in advocacy, gender, human rights, popular education, and social change. These collective experiences were gathered in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, the former Soviet Union, and North America, and they range from participatory research and community development, to neighbourhood organizing and legal rights education, to large-scale campaign advocacy. It delves more deeply into questions of citizenship, constituency-building, social change, gender, and accountability.

Making Politics Work for Development

Making Politics Work for Development PDF Author: World Bank
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464807744
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.

From Poverty to Power

From Poverty to Power PDF Author: Duncan Green
Publisher: Oxfam
ISBN: 0855985933
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
Offers a look at the causes and effects of poverty and inequality, as well as the possible solutions. This title features research, human stories, statistics, and compelling arguments. It discusses about the world we live in and how we can make it a better place.

Open Democracy

Open Democracy PDF 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.

State of Crisis

State of Crisis PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745685293
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Today we hear much talk of crisis and comparisons are often made with the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there is a crucial difference that sets our current malaise apart from the 1930s: today we no longer trust in the capacity of the state to resolve the crisis and to chart a new way forward. In our increasingly globalized world, states have been stripped of much of their power to shape the course of events. Many of our problems are globally produced but the volume of power at the disposal of individual nation-states is simply not sufficient to cope with the problems they face. This divorce between power and politics produces a new kind of paralysis. It undermines the political agency that is needed to tackle the crisis and it saps citizens’ belief that governments can deliver on their promises. The impotence of governments goes hand in hand with the growing cynicism and distrust of citizens. Hence the current crisis is at once a crisis of agency, a crisis of representative democracy and a crisis of the sovereignty of the state. In this book the world-renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and fellow traveller Carlo Bordoni explore the social and political dimensions of the current crisis. While this crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the turmoil following the financial crisis of 2007-8, Bauman and Bordoni argue that the crisis facing Western societies is rooted in a much more profound series of transformations that stretch back further in time and are producing long-lasting effects. This highly original analysis of our current predicament by two of the world’s leading social thinkers will be of interest to a wide readership.

New Power

New Power PDF Author: Jeremy Heimans
Publisher: Random House Canada
ISBN: 0345816463
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
From two influential and visionary thinkers comes a big idea that is changing the way movements catch fire and ideas spread in our highly connected world. For the vast majority of human history, power has been held by the few. "Old power" is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful spend it carefully, like currency. But the technological revolution of the past two decades has made possible a new form of power, one that operates differently, like a current. "New power" is made by many; it is open, participatory, often leaderless, and peer-driven. Like water or electricity, it is most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it, but to channel it. New power is behind the rise of participatory communities like Facebook and YouTube, sharing services like Uber and Airbnb, and rapid-fire social movements like Brexit and #BlackLivesMatter. It explains the unlikely success of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and the unlikelier victory of Donald Trump in 2016. And it gives ISIS its power to propagate its brand and distribute its violence. Even old power institutions like the Papacy, NASA, and LEGO have tapped into the strength of the crowd to stage improbable reinventions. In New Power, the business leaders/social visionaries Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms provide the tools for using new power to successfully spread an idea or lead a movement in the twenty-first century. Drawing on examples from business, politics, and social justice, they explain the new world we live in--a world where connectivity has made change shocking and swift and a world in which everyone expects to participate.

The Sovereign Citizen

The Sovereign Citizen PDF Author: Patrick Weil
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206215
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Present-day Americans feel secure in their citizenship: they are free to speak up for any cause, oppose their government, marry a person of any background, and live where they choose—at home or abroad. Denaturalization and denationalization are more often associated with twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. But there was a time when American-born and naturalized foreign-born individuals in the United States could be deprived of their citizenship and its associated rights. Patrick Weil examines the twentieth-century legal procedures, causes, and enforcement of denaturalization to illuminate an important but neglected dimension of Americans' understanding of sovereignty and federal authority: a citizen is defined, in part, by the parameters that could be used to revoke that same citizenship. The Sovereign Citizen begins with the Naturalization Act of 1906, which was intended to prevent realization of citizenship through fraudulent or illegal means. Denaturalization—a process provided for by one clause of the act—became the main instrument for the transfer of naturalization authority from states and local courts to the federal government. Alongside the federalization of naturalization, a conditionality of citizenship emerged: for the first half of the twentieth century, naturalized individuals could be stripped of their citizenship not only for fraud but also for affiliations with activities or organizations that were perceived as un-American. (Emma Goldman's case was the first and perhaps best-known denaturalization on political grounds, in 1909.) By midcentury the Supreme Court was fiercely debating cases and challenged the constitutionality of denaturalization and denationalization. This internal battle lasted almost thirty years. The Warren Court's eventual decision to uphold the sovereignty of the citizen—not the state—secures our national order to this day. Weil's account of this transformation, and the political battles fought by its advocates and critics, reshapes our understanding of American citizenship.