Download or read book Deepening Democracy written by Francis Adams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-05-30 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adams surveys the impact of transnational organizations and NGOs on Latin American politics since 1990. The transition from military to civilian rule in Latin American countries has benefited local progressive forces, but resilient remnants favoring the past's authoritarian politics have compelled organizations like the UN, IMF, OAS, and World Bank to engage in various campaigns to deepen democratic institutions and norms. Adams argues that to understand current political transformations in the region, one must consider the existing role of external organizations. Latin America is offered as a prime example of the increased influence transnational authorities have over political decisions that had long been the exclusive prerogative of national governments. Beginning with the Latin American experience, Adams reviews the contemporary character of power and politics in the area, outlining how democratic transitions have been limited. UN human rights and reform initiatives are considered. Adams scrutinizes the work of the World Bank, the IMF, and the Inter-American Development Bank to modernize public administration, strengthen political institutions, enhance transparency and accountability, and fortify civil society. He also examines the work and impact and the Organization of American States and various global citizens groups.
Download or read book Legislative Politics in Latin America written by Scott Morgenstern and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-03-04 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This theoretically inspired study explores legislative politics in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Instead of beginning with an assumption that these legislatures are either rubber-stamps or obstructionist bodies, the chapters provide new data and a fresh analytical approach to describe and explain the role of these representative bodies in these consolidating democracies. For each country the book provides three chapters dedicated, in turn, to executive-legislative relations, the legislatures' organizational structure, and the policy process.
Download or read book Political Institutions written by Josep M. Colomer and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2001-02-01 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of institutions is to establish the domains of public activity and the rules to select leaders. Democratic regimes organize in simple institutional frameworks to foster the concentration of power and alternative successive absolute winners and losers. They favour political satisfaction of relatively small groups, as well as policy instability. In contrast, pluralistic institutions produce multiple winners, including multiparty co-operation and agreements. They favour stable, moderate, and consensual policies that can satisfy large groups' interests on a great number of issues. The more complex the political institutions, the more stable and socially efficient the outcome will be. This book develops an extensive analysis of this relationship. It explores concepts, questions and insights based on social choice theory, while empirical focus is cast on more than 40 democratic countries and a few international organizations from late medieval times to the present. The book argues that pluralistic democratic institutions are judged to be better than simple formula of their higher capacity of producing socially satisfactory results.
Download or read book Presidential Breakdowns in Latin America written by M. Llanos and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first comprehensive analysis of a new type of executive instability without regime instability in Latin America referred to as "presidential breakdown." It includes a theoretical introduction framing the debate within the institutional literature on democracy and democratization, and the implications of this new type of executive instability for presidential democracies. Two comparative chapters analyze the causes, procedures, and outcomes of presidential breakdowns in a regional perspective, and country studies provide in-depth analyses of all countries in Latin America that have experienced one or several presidential breakdowns: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. The book also includes an epilogue on the 2009 presidential crisis in Honduras.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions written by R. A. W. Rhodes and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-06-13 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of political institutions is among the founding pillars of political science. With the rise of the 'new institutionalism', the study of institutions has returned to its place in the sun. This volume provides a comprehensive survey of where we are in the study of political institutions, covering both the traditional concerns of political science with constitutions, federalism and bureaucracy and more recent interest in theory and the constructed nature of institutions. The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions draws together a galaxy of distinguished contributors drawn from leading universities across the world. Authoritative reviews of the literature and assessments of future research directions will help to set the research agenda for the next decade.
Download or read book Elections in the Americas A Data Handbook Volume 1 written by Dieter Nohlen and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-04-14 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume work continues the series of election data handbooks published by OUP. It presents a first-ever compendium of electoral data for all 35 countries in the Americas since the introduction of universal male suffrage. Following the overall structure of the series, an initial comparative introduction on elections and electoral systems is followed by chapters on each country. Written by knowledgeable and renowned scholars, the contributions examine the evolution of constitutional and electoral arrangements and provide systematic surveys of the up-to-date electoral provisions and electoral rules. These widely differing rules exert considerable influence on party systems and political processes. Exhaustive statistics on all national elections and referendums are given in each chapter. Together with the other books of this series, Elections in the Americas is a highly reliable resource for historical and cross-national comparisons of elections and electoral systems worldwide.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Political Science written by Robert E. Goodin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-07-07 with total page 1558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the rich resources of the ten-volume series of The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science, this one-volume distillation provides a comprehensive overview of all the main branches of contemporary political science: political theory; political institutions; political behavior; comparative politics; international relations; political economy; law and politics; public policy; contextual political analysis; and political methodology. Sixty-seven of the top political scientists worldwide survey recent developments in those fields and provide penetrating introductions to exciting new fields of study. Following in the footsteps of the New Handbook of Political Science edited by Robert Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann a decade before, this Oxford Handbook will become an indispensable guide to the scope and methods of political science as a whole. It will serve as the reference book of record for political scientists and for those following their work for years to come.
Download or read book The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil written by Barry Ames and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-01-22 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many countries have experimented with different electoral rules in order either to increase involvement in the political system or make it easier to form stable governments. Barry Ames explores this important topic in one of the world's most populous and important democracies, Brazil. This book locates one of the sources of Brazil's "crisis of governance" in the nation's unique electoral system, a system that produces a multiplicity of weak parties and individualistic, pork-oriented politicians with little accountability to citizens. It explains the government's difficulties in adopting innovative policies by examining electoral rules, cabinet formation, executive-legislative conflict, party discipline and legislative negotiation. The book combines extensive use of new sources of data, ranging from historical and demographic analysis in focused comparisons of individual states to unique sources of data for the exploration of legislative politics. The discussion of party discipline in the Chamber of Deputies is the first multivariate model of party cooperation or defection in Latin America that includes measures of such important phenomena as constituency effects, pork-barrel receipts, ideology, electoral insecurity, and intention to seek reelection. With a unique data set and a sophisticated application of rational choice theory, Barry Ames demonstrates the effect of different electoral rules for election to Brazil's legislature. The readership of this book includes anyone wanting to understand the crisis of democratic politics in Brazil. The book will be especially useful to scholars and students in the areas of comparative politics, Latin American politics, electoral analysis, and legislative studies. Barry Ames is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Comparative Politics and Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh.
Download or read book Drivers of Authoritarianism written by Günter Frankenberg and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-12 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drivers of Authoritarianism provides a prescient deep-dive into modern threats to pluralism and democracy in times of crisis. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this incisive book analyses the social, political, economic and psychological consequences of crises during the first decades of the 21st century, powered by the proliferation of authoritarian regimes and their ideologies as well as authoritarian attitudes.
Download or read book Democracies in Development written by J. Mark Payne and published by IDB. This book was released on 2002 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The accompanying CD-ROM features country-by-country election results for presidential and legislative elections."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Coalition Politics and Federalism written by Adrián Albala and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the verticalization of coalition cabinets from the national to the sub-national level. Presenting case studies for countries with federal systems of government, such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, and India, as well as those focusing on states with hybrid systems of government, such as Italy, the contributors analyze multilevel government formation processes to identify vertical congruence between national and sub-national coalitions. The book also examines various factors affecting the degree of congruence of political coalitions, such as the degree of decentralization, federalization and institutionalization of political systems, as well as cleavage structure. This book will be a valuable resource for all scholars interested in coalition politics, as well as for politicians and practitioners in government and parliament.
Download or read book Widening the European Union written by Bernard Steunenberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-08-27 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proposed enlargement of the European Union to include countries from Central and Eastern Europe has become an important political issue. Widening the European Union focuses on those institutional reforms of the Union that may be necessary to make the enlargement possible. The institutional structure, originally designed for the Union of just six states, might not be suitable for a EU of twenty-seven or more member states. An overview of current rational choice theories of institutional change is provided before the volume focuses on several aspects of institutional reforms in the Union. Widening the European Union contains contributions from a distinguished team of European academics. This book is a valuable resource to students of the European Union with an interest in its politics and policy, enlargement and institutional reform.
Download or read book Latin American Democracy written by Richard L. Millett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-04-26 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly thirty years have passed since Latin America began the arduous task of transitioning from military-led rule to democracy. In this time, more countries have moved toward the institutional bases of democracy than at any time in the region’s history. Nearly all countries have held free, competitive elections and most have had peaceful alternations in power between opposing political forces. Despite these advances, however, Latin American countries continue to face serious domestic and international challenges to the consolidation of stable democratic governance. The challenges range from weak political institutions, corruption, legacies of militarism, transnational crime and globalization among others. In Latin American Democracy contributors – both academics and practitioners, North Americans and Latin Americans – explore and assess the state of democratic consolidation in Latin America by focusing on the specific issues and challenges confronting democratic governance in the region.
Download or read book Elections in the Americas A Data Handbook written by Dieter Nohlen and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-04-14 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume work continues the series of election data handbooks published by OUP. It presents a first-ever compendium of electoral data for all 35 countries in the Americas since the introduction of universal male suffrage. Following the overall structure of the series, an initial comparative introduction on elections and electoral systems is followed by chapters on each country. Written by knowledgeable and renowned scholars, the contributions examine the evolution of constitutional and electoral arrangements and provide systematic surveys of the up-to-date electoral provisions and electoral rules. These widely differing rules exert considerable influence on party systems and political processes. Exhaustive statistics on all national elections and referendums are given in each chapter. Together with the other books of this series, Elections in the Americas is a highly reliable resource for historical and cross-national comparisons of elections and electoral systems worldwide.
Download or read book The Political System of Brazil written by Dana de la Fontaine and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents in-depth insights into the polity, politics and policies of the Brazilian political system. It reassesses the processes of change since the country's return to democracy in the 1980s, in the light of autocratic societal structures and suboptimal institutional design, on the one hand, and the political and economic achievements observed, on the other. In their contributions, top Brazilian and international scholars critically examine the development of the political system with a focus on the Lula and Rousseff administrations, and place their actions and failures in the socio-political and economic context so as to uncover the underlying institutional structures, constellations and diverging interests of actors on various decision-making levels and in different political fields. It is the central aim of this book to present a differentiated portrait of the current political landscape and remaining contradictions in Latin America's largest country.
Download or read book Democratic Latin America written by Craig L. Arceneaux and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third edition of Democratic Latin America retains its classic institutional approach to understand contemporary Latin American politics. Each chapter focuses on a different institution and compares how they are constructed differently across countries. Placing a premium on accessibility, the chapters open with a story and end with a detailed country case study, making use of contemporary examples to feed student interest in current events, with comparison-based tables and box features interspersed throughout to stimulate analysis. Every chapter finishes with a set of questions and recommended readings. This approach allows for a very practical approach to politics that encourages critical analysis. Updates to this new edition include: updated comparison-based tables and box features to stimulate analysis; new "Country in the Spotlight" to include developments unique to each country; and discussions on political change in Cuba, indigenous peoples and political power, neopopulism, impeachment procedures, transitional justice, the 2019 protests, the new militarism, the mobilization of women against violence, LGBT rights, the evangelical movement, and the Colombian peace process. A clear-eyed look at political institutions to provide a roadmap to the political activity in a country, Democratic Latin America continues to offer an original way of teaching and learning about Latin American politics.
Download or read book Elections in Africa written by Dieter Nohlen and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1999-07-22 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elections have always been an integral part of post-independence African politics and have assumed utmost importance in the course of recent democratisation processes. However, comparative research on the political development in Africa lacks reliable electoral data. Elections in Africa fills this cap. The handbook is the only reliable source for African elections from independence to present. In the first volume of this series, Elections in Africa presents a country-by-country study of African nations that provides a comparative introduction on elections and electoral systems. Each country chapter examines the history of the institutional and electoral arrangements, the evolution of suffrage and current electoral provisions. Precise and exhaustive data on national elections and referendums are presented comparatively. The book provides a definitive and comprehensive set of data on elections and electoral systems in order to facilitate comparative research. Data is presented in a systematic manner allowing for both historical and cross-national comparisons.
