Download or read book Defining Democracy written by Daniel O. Prosterman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defining Democracy reveals the history of a little-known experiment in urban democracy begun in New York City during the Great Depression and abolished amid the early Cold War. For a decade, New Yorkers utilized a new voting system that produced the most diverse legislatures in the city's history and challenged the American two-party structure. Daniel O. Prosterman examines struggles over electoral reform in New York City to clarify our understanding of democracy's evolution in the United States and the world.
Download or read book Defining Democracy written by Daniel O. Prosterman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-12-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1936, New Yorkers approved a radical change in local democracy. By a margin of nearly two to one, they replaced the corrupt board of aldermen with a city council elected via proportional representation (PR). Rather than traditional winner-take-all elections between two candidates representing two political parties, PR allowed voters to rank candidates on their ballots in order of preference and guaranteed victory to anyone polling more than 75,000 votes. This system enabled the election of the most diverse legislatures in New York's history, comprised of the city's first African American legislators and unprecedented numbers of women and third-party representatives. With their authority threatened, the Democratic and Republican parties allied against PR and the system's coalition of supporters. Following several unsuccessful repeal attempts led by the two major parties, the election of two Communists spurred a groundswell of red-baiting that set the stage for a battle that would define New York City governance for generations. Defining Democracy examines struggles over electoral reform in New York City to clarify our understanding of democracy's evolution in the United States and the world. In the midst of global crises concerning the purpose and power of government during the Great Depression, Second World War, and early Cold War, New Yorkers debated the meaning of self-rule in the United States. Through a series of campaigns over the expansion of voting rights in New York City, activists challenged the boundaries of who could be elected, what interests could be represented, and ultimately what policies could be implemented at the local level.
Download or read book Defining and Measuring Democracy written by David Beetham and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1994-11-29 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rapid worldwide phase of democratization since the 1980s has stimulated a renewed interest in how we define and measure democracy. The contributors to this volume include leading political theorists, political scientists and experts in comparative government from across Europe. Defining and Measuring Democracy offers an integrated analysis of key debates and issues ranging from the question of how to define democracy to the issue of cultural diversity. Each chapter offers new insights and approaches placed in the context of contemporary debates.
Download or read book Democracy s Meanings written by Nicholas T. Davis and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do the people who make up American democracy view and judge its process?
Download or read book Open Democracy written by Hélène Landemore and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Democratization and Research Methods written by Michael Coppedge and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-25 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democratization and Research Methods summarizes what researchers know about why countries become and remain democracies, and why they often do not. It also evaluates the various methods social scientists use to answer such questions. Michael Coppedge draws lessons that can be applied to any political phenomenon that is studied comparatively.
Download or read book Defining Democracy written by Peter Emerson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-12-03 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defining Democracy looks both at the theory of why and the history of how different voting procedures have come to be used – or not, as the case may be – in the three fields of democratic structures: firstly, in decision-making, both in society at large and in the elected chamber; secondly, in elections to and within those chambers; and thirdly, in the various forms of governance, from no-party to multi-party and all-party, which have emerged as a result.
Download or read book Defying Corporations Defining Democracy written by Dean Ritz and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these 70 essays, speeches, sermons and screeds, POCLADers probe: corporations as "legal persons"; corporate social responsibility as a ploy; strategies for amending state corporation codes and challenging judge-made laws; and much, much more.This collection, which Howard Zinn calls "powerfully persuasive," chronicles POCLAD's evolution -- among the twelve POCLADers and with thousands of activists. Here are hidden histories, crisp analyses and thoughtful responses to corporate apologists -- all in one provocative book.
Download or read book Defining Israel written by Simon Rabinovitch and published by Hebrew Union College Press. This book was released on 2018-11-12 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defining Israel: The Jewish State, Democracy, and the Law is the first book in any language devoted to the controversial passage of Israel's nation-state law. Israel has no constitution, and though it calls itself the Jewish state there is no agreement among Israelis on how that fact should be reflected in the government's laws or by its courts. Since the 1990s a number of civil society groups and legislators have drafted constitutions and proposed Basic Laws with constitutional standing that would clarify what it means for Israel to be a "Jewish and democratic state." Are these bills liberal or chauvinist? Are they a defense of the Knesset or an attack on the independence of the courts? Is their intention democratic or anti-democratic? The fight over the nation-state law-whether to have one and what should be in it-toppled the 19th Knesset's governing coalition and, even after its passage on July 29, 2018, remains a point of contention among Israel's lawmakers and increasingly the Israeli public. Defining Israel brings together influential scholars, journalists, and politicians, observers and participants, opponents and proponents, Jews and Arabs, all debating the merits and meaning of Israel's nation-state law. Together with translations of each draft law, the final law, and other key documents, the essays and sources in Defining Israel are essential to understand the ongoing debate over what it means for Israel to be a Jewish and democratic state.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy written by David Estlund and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012-07-19 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes 22 new pieces by leading political philosophers, on traditional issues (such as authority and equality) and emerging issues (such as race, and money in politics). The pieces are clear and accessible will interest both students and scholars working in philosophy, political science, law, economics, and more.
Download or read book Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes written by Andrea Kendall-Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only introduction to cover the full spectrum of political systems, from democracy to dictatorship and the growing number of systems that fall between, equipping readers to think critically about democracy's future trajectory.
Download or read book Defining Landscape Democracy written by Shelley Egoz and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-29 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stimulating book explores theories, conceptual frameworks, and cultural approaches with the purpose of uncovering a cross-cultural understanding of landscape democracy, a concept at the intersection of landscape, democracy and spatial justice. The authors of Defining Landscape Democracy address a number of questions that are critical to the contemporary discourse on the right to landscape: Why is democracy relevant to landscape? How do we democratise landscape? How might we achieve landscape and spatial justice?
Download or read book The Democratic Century written by Seymour Martin Lipset and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study on democracy and democratic systems, two scholars offer an expansive view of democratic systems and explain why democracy has succeeded in some countries and has failed in others.
Download or read book Demagogue written by Michael Signer and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2009-02-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A demagogue is a tyrant who owes his initial rise to the democratic support of the masses. Huey Long, Hugo Chavez, and Moqtada al-Sadr are all clear examples of this dangerous byproduct of democracy. Demagogue takes a long view of the fight to defend democracy from within, from the brutal general Cleon in ancient Athens, the demagogues who plagued the bloody French Revolution, George W. Bush's naïve democratic experiment in Iraq, and beyond. This compelling narrative weaves stories about some of history's most fascinating figures, including Adolf Hitler, Senator Joe McCarthy, and General Douglas Macarthur, and explains how humanity's urge for liberty can give rise to dark forces that threaten that very freedom. To find the solution to democracy's demagogue problem, the book delves into the stories of four great thinkers who all personally struggled with democracy--Plato, Alexis de Tocqueville, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt.
Download or read book Democracy May Not Exist But We ll Miss It When It s Gone written by Astra Taylor and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A New Civil Rights Leader” explores what we mean when we speak of democracy and if democracy can truly ever exist (LA Times). There is no shortage of democracy, at least in name, and yet it is in crisis everywhere we look. From a cabal of plutocrats in the White House to gerrymandering and dark-money campaign contributions, it is clear that the principle of government by and for the people is not living up to its promise. The problems lie deeper than any one election cycle. As Astra Taylor demonstrates, real democracy—fully inclusive and completely egalitarian—has in fact never existed. In a tone that is both philosophical and anecdotal, weaving together history, theory, the stories of individuals, and interviews with such leading thinkers as Cornel West and Wendy Brown, Taylor invites us to reexamine the term. Is democracy a means or an end, a process or a set of desired outcomes? What if those outcomes, whatever they may be—peace, prosperity, equality, liberty, an engaged citizenry—can be achieved by non-democratic means? In what areas of life should democratic principles apply? If democracy means rule by the people, what does it mean to rule and who counts as the people? Democracy’s inherent paradoxes often go unnamed and unrecognized. Exploring such questions, Democracy May Not Exist offers a better understanding of what is possible, what we want, why democracy is so hard to realize, and why it is worth striving for. “Astra Taylor will change how you think about democracy. . . . She unpacks it, wrestles with it, with the question of who gets included and how, and excavates the invisible assumptions that have been bred into our idea of democracy.” —Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show “An impressive contribution. . . . Taylor sets out to impart some coherence and substance to the term in order to rescue it from ignorance and obfuscation and displays considerable intellectual nimbleness.” —Randall Kennedy, The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent, paradigm-shifting . . . Taylor’s deep and wide examination of democratic movements, conversations, and grassroots institutions makes the reader feel . . . democracy as pleasure of thinking and acting.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books
Download or read book Democracy Disfigured written by Nadia Urbinati and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Democracy Disfigured, Nadia Urbinati diagnoses the ills that beset the body politic in an age of hyper-partisanship and media monopolies and offers a spirited defense of the messy compromises and contentious outcomes that define democracy. Urbinati identifies three types of democratic disfiguration: the unpolitical, the populist, and the plebiscitarian. Each undermines a crucial division that a well-functioning democracy must preserve: the wall separating the free forum of public opinion from governmental institutions that enact the will of the people. Unpolitical democracy delegitimizes political opinion in favor of expertise. Populist democracy radically polarizes the public forum in which opinion is debated. And plebiscitary democracy overvalues the aesthetic and nonrational aspects of opinion. For Urbinati, democracy entails a permanent struggle to make visible the issues that citizens deem central to their lives. Opinion is thus a form of action as important as the mechanisms that organize votes and mobilize decisions. Urbinati focuses less on the overt enemies of democracy than on those who pose as its friends: technocrats wedded to procedure, demagogues who make glib appeals to "the people," and media operatives who, given their preference, would turn governance into a spectator sport and citizens into fans of opposing teams.
Download or read book The Failure of Democratic Nation Building Ideology Meets Evolution written by A. Somit and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-29 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history authoritarian governments have outnumbered democratic ones to an overwhelming degree. Even today, true democracies are an exception. In this book, Somit and Peterson argue that the main reason for this pattern is that humans are social primates with an innate tendency for hierarchical and authoritarian social and political structures. Democracy requires very special 'enabling conditions' before it can be supported by a state, conditions that require decades to evolve. As a result, attempts to export democracy through nation-building to states without these enabling conditions are doomed to failure. The authors argue that money and energy devoted to nation-building around the globe by the U.S. would be better spent on problems facing the country domestically.
