Download or read book Religion Class Coalitions and Welfare States written by Kees van Kersbergen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-06 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book radically revises established knowledge in comparative welfare state studies and introduces a new perspective on how religion shaped modern social protection systems. The interplay of societal cleavage structures and electoral rules produced the different political class coalitions sustaining the three welfare regimes of the Western world. In countries with proportional electoral systems the absence or presence of state–church conflicts decided whether class remained the dominant source of coalition building or whether a political logic not exclusively based on socio-economic interests (e.g. religion) was introduced into politics, particularly social policy. The political class-coalitions in countries with majoritarian systems, on the other hand, allowed only for the residual-liberal welfare state to emerge, as in the US or the UK. This book also reconsiders the role of Protestantism. Reformed Protestantism substantially delayed and restricted modern social policy. The Lutheran state churches positively contributed to the introduction of social protection programs.
Download or read book The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe written by Stathis N. Kalyvas and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kalyvas also lays a foundation for a theory of the Christian Democratic phenomenon which would specify the conditions under which confessional parties succeed and would determine the impact of such parties, and the way they are formed, on politics and society.
Download or read book What is Christian Democracy written by Carlo Invernizzi Accetti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian Democratic actors and thinkers have been at the forefront of many of the twentieth century's key political battles - from the construction of the international human rights regime, through the process of European integration and the creation of postwar welfare regimes, to Latin American development policies during the Cold War. Yet their core ideas remain largely unknown, especially in the English-speaking world. Combining conceptual and historical approaches, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti traces the development of this ideology in the thought and writings of some of its key intellectual and political exponents, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. In so doing he sheds light on a number of important contemporary issues, from the question of the appropriate place of religion in presumptively 'secular' liberal-democratic regimes, to the normative resources available for building a political response to the recent rise of far-right populism.
Download or read book Christian democracy in Italy and France written by Mario Einaudi and published by Archon. This book was released on 1969-11 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Christian Democracy in Europe Since 1945 written by Michael Gehler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to reveal the roles of the Christian Democratic parties in postwar Europe, systematically and from a pan-European perspective.
Download or read book Christian Democratic Parties in Europe Since the End of the Cold War written by Steven Van Hecke and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period since the end of the Cold War has been characterised by an acceleration in the European integration process, a changing pattern of political ideologies and the emergence of new political parties and issues. This book assesses the impact of these phenomena on Christian Democratic parties in the current and future member states of the European Union and highlights some of the particularities and universalities of European Christian Democracy from a comparative and transnational perspective. Political scientists and historians from various universities examine the way in which Christian Democratic parties have responded to these challenges (for instance by a rapprochement with non-Christian Democrats) and explain how those responses have resulted in failure in some cases and success in others.
Download or read book Social Capitalism written by Kees van Kersbergen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism written by Michael Gehler and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debates on the role of Christian Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe too often remain strongly tied to national historiographies. With the edited collection the contributing authors aim to reconstruct Christian Democracy’s role in the fall of Communism from a bird's-eye perspective by covering the entire region and by taking “third-way” options in the broader political imaginary of late-Cold War Europe into account. The book’s twelve chapters present the most recent insights on this topic and connect scholarship on the Iron Curtain’s collapse with scholarship on political Catholicism. Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism offers the reader a two-fold perspective. The first approach examines the efforts undertaken by Western European actors who wanted to foster or support Christian Democratic initiatives in Central and Eastern Europe. The second approach is devoted to the (re-)emergence of homegrown Christian Democratic formations in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the volume’s seminal contributions lies in its documentation of the decisive role that Christian Democracy played in supporting the political and anti-political forces that engineered the collapse of Communism from within between 1989 and 1991.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Italian Politics written by Erik Jones and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 801 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Italian Politics provides a comprehensive look at the political life of one of Europe's most exciting and turbulent democracies. Under the hegemonic influence of Christian Democracy in the early post-World War II decades, Italy went through a period of rapid growth and political transformation. In part this resulted in tumult and a crisis of governability; however, it also gave rise to innovation in the form of Eurocommunism and new forms of political accommodation. The great strength of Italy lay in its constitution; its great weakness lay in certain legacies of the past. Organized crime--popularly but not exclusively associated with the mafia--is one example. A self-contained and well entrenched 'caste' of political and economic elites is another. These weaknesses became apparent in the breakdown of political order in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This ushered in a combination of populist political mobilization and experimentation with electoral systems design, and the result has been more evolutionary than transformative. Italian politics today is different from what it was during the immediate post-World War II period, but it still shows many of the influences of the past.
Download or read book Italy s Christian Democracy written by Rosario Forlenza and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive study of Italian Christian Democracy in English, Italy's Christian Democracy unravels the encounter between Catholicism and democracy from pre-unification Italy in the eighteenth century to the near-present. Forlenza and Thomassen put the triumphant emergence of the Christian Democratic political party that ruled Italy from 1948 to 1994 into historical perspective. With a focus on critical moments of modern Italian history - the Enlightenment and French Revolution, the Risorgimento, World War I, the fascist period, World War II, the post-war Republic - Italy's Christian Democracy demonstrates the often-dramatic ways in which Catholic thinkers, from laymen to priests and bishops, sought to interpret and direct democratic thought and practice in line with Catholic ethics. The Christian Democracy was much more than reactionary politics - namely a sincere attempt to integrate a religious worldview into modern politics. Contrary to a purely secular reading, the authors demonstrate that the Catholic embrace of political modernity and democracy emerged as a historically significant alternative to both fascism and socialism, liberalism and conservativism, attempting to re-anchor democracy, justice, and freedom in a religiously argued ethos. Italy's Christian Democracy contributes to existing scholarship by stressing two interrelated aspects crucial for a better understanding of the role that Catholicism and Christian Democracy have played in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the political dimension of transcendence and spirituality and the transformative power of historical experiences and events. The narrative considers the religious and spiritual impulse behind Christian democratic thought, framing Christian Democracy as a distinct form of "political spirituality". Offering a novel historical narrative, Italy's Christian Democracy stresses the contemporary relevance of the nexus between Christianity and modern politics: the current spread of identity politics and the increasing use of religion in political and public discourse, recently appropriated by new populist parties and movements, in Italy and beyond.
Download or read book From Fascism to Democracy written by Robert Ventresca and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text tells the story of the birth of the post-war Italian political system through the lens of a single event: the Italian national election of 1948. It is a story about the fall of Fascism and the achievements of the Italian Resistance, and Italian political culture.
Download or read book The Strange Death of Marxism written by Paul Edward Gottfried and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2005-09-08 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Strange Death of Marxism seeks to refute certain misconceptions about the current European Left and its relation to Marxist and Marxist-Leninist parties that existed in the recent past. Among the misconceptions that the book treats critically and in detail is that the Post-Marxist Left (a term the book uses to describe this phenomenon) springs from a distinctly Marxist tradition of thought and that it represents an unqualified rejection of American capitalist values and practices. Three distinctive features of the book are the attempts to dissociate the present European Left from Marxism, the presentation of this Left as something that developed independently of the fall of the Soviet empire, and the emphasis on the specifically American roots of the European Left. Gottfried examines the multicultural orientation of this Left and concludes that it has little or nothing to do with Marxism as an economic-historical theory. It does, however, owe a great deal to American social engineering and pluralist ideology and to the spread of American thought and political culture to Europe. American culture and American political reform have foreshadowed related developments in Europe by years or even whole decades. Contrary to the impression that the United States has taken antibourgeois attitudes from Europeans, the author argues exactly the opposite. Since the end of World War II, Europe has lived in the shadow of an American empire that has affected the Old World, including its self-described anti-Americans. Gottfried believes that this influence goes back to who reads or watches whom more than to economic and military disparities. It is the awareness of American cultural as well as material dominance that fuels the anti-Americanism that is particularly strong on the European Left. That part of the European spectrum has, however, reproduced in a more extreme form what began as an American leap into multiculturalism. Hostility toward America, however, can be transformed quickly into extreme affection for the United States, which occurred during the Clinton administration and during the international efforts to bring a multicultural society to the Balkans. Clearly written and well conceived, The Strange Death of Marxism will be of special interest to political scientists, historians of contemporary Europe, and those critical of multicultural trends, particularly among Euro-American conservatives.
Download or read book Christianity Democracy and the Shadow of Constantine written by George E. Demacopoulos and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2017 Alpha Sigma Nu Award The collapse of communism in eastern Europe has forced traditionally Eastern Orthodox countries to consider the relationship between Christianity and liberal democracy. Contributors examine the influence of Constantinianism in both the post-communist Orthodox world and in Western political theology. Constructive theological essays feature Catholic and Protestant theologians reflecting on the relationship between Christianity and democracy, as well as Orthodox theologians reflecting on their tradition’s relationship to liberal democracy. The essays explore prospects of a distinctively Christian politics in a post-communist, post-Constantinian age.
Download or read book Democracy Italian Style written by Joseph LaPalombara and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes Italian politics, argues that crises that threaten to destroy the government actually make democracy there stronger, and discusses the Italian political parties
Download or read book The Archipelago written by John Foot and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'An enjoyable, highly readable history that manages to bring murky, often fiendishly complex events into the light' Sunday Times Italy emerged from the Second World War in ruins. Divided, invaded and economically broken, it was a nation that some people claimed had ceased to exist. And yet, as rural society disappeared almost overnight, by the 1960s, it could boast the fastest-growing economy in the world. In The Archipelago, historian John Foot chronicles Italy's tumultuous history from the post-war period to the present day. From the silent assimilation of fascists into society after 1945 to the artistic peak of neorealist cinema, he examines both the corrupt and celebrated sides of the country. While often portrayed as a failed state on the margins of Europe, Italy has instead been at the centre of innovation and change – a political laboratory. This new history tells the fascinating story of a country always marked by scandal but with the constant ability to re-invent itself. Comprising original research and lively insights, The Archipelago chronicles the crises and modernisations of more than seventy years of post-war Italy, from its fields, factories, squares and housing estates to Rome's political intrigue.
Download or read book Western Europe s Democratic Age written by Martin Conway and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe's Democratic Age, Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe's postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century. Western Europe's Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.
Download or read book First They Took Rome written by David Broder and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italy’s political disaster under a microscope There is little that hasn’t gone wrong for Italy in the last three decades. Economic growth has flatlined, infrastructure has crumbled, and out-of-work youth find their futures stuck on hold. These woes have been reflected in the country’s politics, from Silvio Berlusconi’s scandals to the rise of the far right. Many commentators blame Italy’s malaise on cultural ills—pointing to the corruption of public life or a supposedly endemic backwardness. In this reading, Italy has failed to converge with the neoliberal reforms mounted by other European countries, leaving it to trail behind the rest of the world. First They Took Rome offers a different perspective: Italy isn’t failing to keep up with its international peers but farther along the same path of decline they are following. In the 1980s, Italy boasted the West’s strongest Communist Party; today, social solidarity is collapsing, working people feel ever more atomized, and democratic institutions grow increasingly hollow. Studying the rise of forces like Matteo Salvini’s Lega, this book shows how the populist right drew on a deep well of social despair, ignored by the liberal centre. Italy’s recent history is a warning from the future—the story of a collapse of public life that risks spreading across the West.
