Download or read book Voice and Vote written by Stephanie McNulty and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-04 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the months following disgraced ex-President Alberto Fujimori's flight to Japan, Peru had a political crisis on its hands. The newly elected government that came together in mid-2001 faced a skeptical and suspicious public, with no magic bullet for achieving legitimacy. Many argued that the future of democracy was at stake, and that the government's ability to decentralize and incorporate new actors in decision-making processes was critical. Toward that end, the country's political elite devolved power to subnational governments and designed new institutions to encourage broader citizen participation. By 2002, Peru's participatory decentralization reform (PDR) was finalized and the experiment began. This book explores the possibilities and limitations of the decision to restructure political systems in a way that promotes participation. The analysis also demonstrates the power that political, historical, and institutional factors can have in the design and outcomes of participatory institutions. Using original data from six regions of Peru, political scientist Stephanie McNulty documents variation in PDR implementation, delves into the factors that explain this variation, and points to regional factors as prime determinants in the success or failure of participatory institutions.

Download or read book Los Medios en la Democracia Enrique Pe a Nieto Presidente written by Emeterio Guevara Ramos and published by Palibrio. This book was released on 2012 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La serie de reformas políticas crearon y fortalecieron las instituciones electorales mexicanas que lejos de consolidad la democracia con la aceptación de los resultados electorales han llevado a conflicto postelectorales mayores. El quiebre de los vínculos democráticos entre candidatos derrotados e instituciones y la grieta entre medios de comunicación, partidos y ciudadanos ha sido alimentada no solo por el incumplimiento al apego a las normas democráticas sino por las denuncias - infundadas la mayor parte de ellas - de inequidad y manipulación. En este entorno Enrique Peña Nieto va a tomar posesión del nuevo gobierno el primero de diciembre. Emeterio Guevara en un esplendido libro reflexiona acerca del más importante momento político de México, el triunfo de Enrique Peña Nieto, la democracia, los medios de comunicación y los alcances de la polarización social. Este libro representa la culminación de los esfuerzos de la brillante carrera del autor para entender el proceso de transición y la consolidación democrática de México. Ciertamente será leído por todos aquellos que quieren entender los entramados del poder y su vinculación con los medios de comunicación.

Download or read book The Guatemalan Military Project written by Jennifer Schirmer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1999, the Guatemala truth commission issued its report on human rights violations during Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war that ended in 1996. The commission, sponsored by the UN, estimates the conflict resulted in 200,000 deaths and disappearances. The commission holds the Guatemalan military responsible for 93 percent of the deaths. In The Guatemalan Military Project, Jennifer Schirmer documents the military's role in human rights violations through a series of extensive interviews striking in their brutal frankness and unique in their first-hand descriptions of the campaign against Guatemala's citizens. High-ranking officers explain in their own words their thoughts and feelings regarding violence, political opposition, national security doctrine, democracy, human rights, and law. Additional interviews with congressional deputies, Guatemalan lawyers, journalists, social scientists, and a former president give a full and balanced account of the Guatemalan power structure and ruling system. With expert analysis of these interviews in the context of cultural, legal, and human rights considerations, The Guatemalan Military Project provides a successful evaluation of the possibilities and processes of conversion from war to peace in Latin America and around the world.

Download or read book Sustaining Civil Society written by Philip Oxhorn and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-08-21 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “South America is not the poorest continent in the world, but it may very well be the most unjust.” This statement by Ricardo Lagos, then president of Chile, at the Summit of the Americas in January 2004 captures nicely the dilemma that faces Latin American countries in the wake of the transition to democracy that swept across the continent in the last two decades of the twentieth century. While political rights are now available to citizens at unprecedented levels, social and economic rights lag far behind, and the fledgling democracies struggle with long legacies of poverty, inequality, and corruption. Key to understanding what is happening in Latin America today is the relationship between the state and civil society. In this ambitious book, Philip Oxhorn sets forth a theory of civil society adequate for explaining current developments in a way that such controversial neoconservative theories as Francis Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism or Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” cannot. Inspired by the rich political sociology of an earlier era and the classic work of T. H. Marshall on citizenship, Oxhorn studies the process by which social groups are incorporated, or not, into national socioeconomic and political development through an approach that focuses on the “social construction of citizenship.”

Download or read book The Struggle for Democratic Politics in the Dominican Republic written by Jonathan Hartlyn and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past several decades, the Dominican Republic has experienced striking political stagnation in spite of dramatic socioeconomic transformations. In this work, Jonathan Hartlyn offers a new explanation for the country's political evolution, based on a broad comparative perspective. Hartlyn rejects cultural explanations unduly focused on legacies from the Spanish colonial era and structural explanations excessively centered on the lack of national autonomy. Instead, he highlights the independent impact of political and institutional factors and historical legacies, while also considering changes in Dominican society and the influence of the United States and other international forces. In particular, Hartlyn examines how the Dominican Republic's tragic nineteenth-century history established a legacy of neopatrimonialism, a form of rule that found extreme expression in the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo and has continued to shape politics down to the present. By examining economic policymaking and often conflictual elections, Hartlyn also analyzes the missed opportunity for democracy during the rule of the Dominican Revolutionary Party and the democratic tensions of the administrations of Joaquin Balaguer.

Download or read book Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America written by Scott Mainwaring and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-31 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a new theory for why political regimes emerge, and why they subsequently survive or break down. It then analyzes the emergence, survival and fall of democracies and dictatorships in Latin America since 1900. Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán argue for a theoretical approach situated between long-term structural and cultural explanations and short-term explanations that look at the decisions of specific leaders. They focus on the political preferences of powerful actors - the degree to which they embrace democracy as an intrinsically desirable end and their policy radicalism - to explain regime outcomes. They also demonstrate that transnational forces and influences are crucial to understand regional waves of democratization. Based on extensive research into the political histories of all twenty Latin American countries, this book offers the first extended analysis of regime emergence, survival and failure for all of Latin America over a long period of time.

Download or read book An Eternal Struggle written by Michael J. Ard and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-10-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ard examines Mexico's long transition to democracy and the vital role played by the National Action Party, an opposition system party inspired by Catholic social doctrine and dedicated to democratic values. Ard examines the problem of democratic transitions by focusing on Mexico's National Action Party (PAN), a democratic opposition party based on Catholic social doctrine. The 2000 defeat of Mexico's long-time ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party was more than the displacement of one ruling clique by another. More profoundly, Fox's stunning victory closed the book on a persistent political-religious conflict—a great party conflict—that had dogged Mexico since its break with the Spanish Empire. The 2000 election represented the end of a long conversion process, a reconciliation between Mexico's Catholic and Revolutionary political traditions, and the forging of a new national political consensus. Ard examines Mexico's long transition to democracy in which the PAN, an opposition system party inspired by Catholic social doctrine and dedicated to democratic values, played a vital role. The book begins with a theoretical framework to understanding the Mexican transition, with an emphasis placed on the importance of conciliation, political liberties, and the democratic opposition party. Ard then addresses the fundamental church-state cleavage and how it shaped Mexico's great parties. He then looks at the founding of the National Action Party, a reforming system party that broke the great party mold. The bulk of his analysis centers on the details of the political transition and the challenges ahead for Mexican democracy. This book is of particular importance to scholars, students, and researchers involved with Mexican politics and history, and Latin American Studies in general.

Download or read book Widening Democracy Citizens and Participatory Schemes in Brazil and Chile written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-08-17 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From democratic restoration in the 1980s up to today, most Latin American countries have been struggling constantly to find a workable balance between the need to strengthen the authority of state institutions and their citizens’ aspirations to have a real say in the decision-making process. This book looks at the contrasting ways in which both Brazil and Chile have been dealing with societal demands for participation during the last two decades. The contributors to this volume highlight a series of historical and political factors that help to understand why Brazil has been able to introduce innovative democratizing policies while Chile has largely failed in the advancement of participatory schemes as its decision-making process continues to be heavily top-down and technocratic. Contributors: Rebecca N. Abers, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Adolfo Castillo Díaz, Herwig Cleuren, Gonzalo Delamaza, Vicente Espinoza, Joe Foweraker, Marcus Klein, Kees Koonings, Adalmir Marquetti, Patricio Navia, William R. Nylen, Paul W. Posner, Patricio Silva, and Brian Wampler.

Download or read book Struggles of Voice written by José Antonio Lucero and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2008-10-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last two decades, indigenous populations in Latin America have achieved a remarkable level of visibility and political effectiveness, particularly in Ecuador and Bolivia. In Struggles of Voice, Jose Antonio Lucero examines these two outstanding examples in order to understand their different patterns of indigenous mobilization and to reformulate the theoretical model by which we link political representation to social change. Building on extensive fieldwork, Lucero considers Ecuador's united indigenous movement and compares it to the more fragmented situation in Bolivia. He analyzes the mechanisms at work in political and social structures to explain the different outcomes in each case. Lucero assesses the intricacies of the many indigenous organizations and the influence of various NGOs to uncover how the conflicts within social movements, the shifting nature of indigenous identities, and the politics of transnationalism all contribute to the success or failure of political mobilization.Blending philosophical inquiry with empirical analysis, Struggles of Voice is an informed and incisive comparative history of indigenous movements in these two Andean countries. It helps to redefine our understanding of the complex intersections of social movements and political representation.

Download or read book Political Parties written by Richard Gunther and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2002-03-07 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, with contributions from leading scholars in the field, presents a critical overview of much of the recent literature on political parties. It systematically assesses the capacity of existing concepts, typologies, and methodological approaches to deal with contemporary parties. It critically analyses the 'decline of parties' literature both from a conceptual perspective and - with regard to antiparty attitudes among citizens - on the basis of empirical analyses of survey data. It systematically re-examines the underpinnings of rational-choice analyses of electoral competition, as well as the misapplication of standard party models as the 'catch-all party.' Several chapters reexamine existing models of parties and party typologies, particularly with regard to the capacity of commonly used concepts to capture the wide variation among parties that exist in old and new democracies today, and with regard to their ability to deal adequately with the new challenges that parties are facing in rapidly changing political, social and technological environments. In particular, two detailed case studies demonstrate how party models are significant not only as frameworks for scholarly research, but also insofar as they can affect party performance. Other chapters also examine in detail how corruption and party patronage have contributed to party decline, as well as the public attitudes towards parties in several countries. In the aggregate, the various contributions to this volume reject the notion that a 'decline of party' has progressed to such an extent as to threaten the survival of parties as the crucial intermediary actors in modern democracies. The contributing authors argue, however, that parties are facing a new set of sometimes demanding challenges. Not only have parties differed significantly in their ability to successfully meet these challenges, but the core concepts, typologies, party chdels and methodological approaches that have guided research in this area over the past 40 years have met with only mixed success in adequately capturing these recent developments and serving as fruitful frameworks for analysis. This book is intended to remedy some of these shortcomings.

Download or read book The Politics of Uncertainty written by Andreas Schedler and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-08 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a major new theory of authoritarian politics. It studies regime struggles between government and opposition under electoral authoritarianism and argues that autocracies suffer from institutional uncertainties.

Download or read book The Resilience of Democracy written by Peter Burnell and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-19 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together studies of the small number of previously established states that have retained and/or restored democracy despite - in many cases - formidable economic, social or political challenges. It seeks to establish common themes, whether or not they appear to fit a grand casual theory. It is, after all, the very adaptability of democratic systems that characterises their persistence, durability and resilience.

Download or read book Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America written by Scott Mainwaring and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-05-13 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing the current debate regarding the liabilities and merits of presidential government, this work asks: does presidentialism make it less likely that democratic governments will be able to manage political conflict, as many prominent scholars have argued? With the unprecedented wave of transitions to democracy since the 1970s, this question has been hotly contested in political and intellectual circles all over the globe. The contributors to this volume examine variations among different presidential systems and sceptically view claims that presidentialism has added significantly to the problems of democratic governance and stability. The contributors argue that presidential systems vary in important ways, mostly according to the constitutional powers accorded to the president to affect legislation and the degree to which presidents parties control legislative majorities.

Download or read book Handbook of Latin American Studies written by Dolores Moyano Martin and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1997-12-01 with total page 956 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with volume 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Stuides, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of more than 130 specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year between social sciences and humanities. The Handbook annotates works on Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the Guianas, Spanish South America, and Brazil, as well as materials covering Latin America as a whole. Most of the subsections are preceded by introductory essays that serve as biannual evaluations of the literature and research underway in specialized areas. The Handbook of Latin American Studies is the oldest continuing reference work in the field. Dolores Moyano Martin, of the Library of Congress Hispanic Division, has been the editor since 1977, and P. Sue Mundell has been assistant editor since 1994. The subject categories for Volume 55 are as follows: Anthropology (including Archaeology and Ethnology) Economics Electronic Resources for the Social Sciences Geography Government and Politics International Relations Sociology

Download or read book Authoritarianism and Democratization written by Gerardo L. Munck and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of Argentina's military dictatorship that makes an original contribution to the broader understanding of regime structure, regime change, and transitions from authoritarian rule.

Download or read book Engendering Democracy in Chile written by Annie G. Dandavati and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2005 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engendering Democracy in Chile documents the rise of a women's movement in Chile in response to the establishment of a military regime. It focuses on the growth of the women's movement and its institutionalization under the new democratic government and concludes with its achievements while highlighting the challenges faced by women as they work for political and economic change in Chile.

Download or read book Democracy in Mexico written by Pablo González Casanova and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1970 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: