Download or read book Patronage Politics Divides Us written by The Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection and published by Real African Publishers. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patronage Politics Divides Us is the culmination of a research project that forms part of MISTRA's first suite of eight priority research projects. The research explores the relationship between patronage, poverty, and inequality with a particular focus on its impact on the conduct of local politics. The overall aim of the study was to explore the possibility of constituting public institutions in a manner that enables them to become legitimate arbiters between the various interests, rather than as instruments that are captured by contending interest groups for their own accumulation. Most importantly, this study was necessitated by the realization that postapartheid patronage politics has not received sufficient scholarly attention. The report is a profile of socioeconomic life in South Africa's various communities as experienced not only by locals but also by foreign-born residents. The findings provide a window on relationships between councilors, business interests, and local party organizations.

Download or read book Patronage Politics Divides Us written by MISTRA MISTRA and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2013-06-05 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patronage Politics Divides Us: A Study of Poverty, Patronage and Inequality in South Africa explores the relationship between patronage, poverty, and inequality with a particular focus on its impact on the conduct of local politics. The overall aim of the study was to explore the possibility of constituting public institutions in a manner that enables them to become legitimate arbiters between the various interests, rather than as instruments that are captured by contending interest groups for their own accumulation. Most importantly, this study was necessitated by the realisation that post-apartheid patronage politics has not received sufficient scholarly attention. This research study aims to help fill that gap, especially by contributing empirical research to the subject. The report goes beyond answering the primary questions of the study: it is a profile of socio economic life in South Africas various communities as experienced not only by locals, but also by foreign-born residents. The findings provide a window on relationships between councillors, business interests, and local party organisations.

Download or read book Democracies Divided written by Thomas Carothers and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A must-read for anyone concerned about the fate of contemporary democracies.”—Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Why divisions have deepened and what can be done to heal them As one part of the global democratic recession, severe political polarization is increasingly afflicting old and new democracies alike, producing the erosion of democratic norms and rising societal anger. This volume is the first book-length comparative analysis of this troubling global phenomenon, offering in-depth case studies of countries as wide-ranging and important as Brazil, India, Kenya, Poland, Turkey, and the United States. The case study authors are a diverse group of country and regional experts, each with deep local knowledge and experience. Democracies Divided identifies and examines the fissures that are dividing societies and the factors bringing polarization to a boil. In nearly every case under study, political entrepreneurs have exploited and exacerbated long-simmering divisions for their own purposes—in the process undermining the prospects for democratic consensus and productive governance. But this book is not simply a diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Each case study discusses actions that concerned citizens and organizations are taking to counter polarizing forces, whether through reforms to political parties, institutions, or the media. The book’s editors distill from the case studies a range of possible ways for restoring consensus and defeating polarization in the world’s democracies. Timely, rigorous, and accessible, this book is of compelling interest to civic activists, political actors, scholars, and ordinary citizens in societies beset by increasingly rancorous partisanship.

Download or read book Patronage as Politics in South Asia written by Anastasia Piliavsky and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western policymakers, political activists and academics alike see patronage as the chief enemy of open, democratic societies. Patronage, for them, is a corrupting force, a hallmark of failed and failing states, and the obverse of everything that good, modern governance ought to be. South Asia poses a frontal challenge for this consensus. Here the world's most populous, pluralist and animated democracy is also a hotbed of corruption with persistently startling levels of inequality. Patronage as Politics in South Asia confronts this paradox with calm erudition: sixteen essays by anthropologists, historians and political scientists show, from a wide range of cultural and historical angles, that in South Asia patronage is no feudal residue or retrograde political pressure, but a political form vital in its own right. This volume suggests that patronage is no foe to South Asia's burgeoning democratic cultures, but may in fact be their main driving force.

Download or read book Making Sense of Corruption written by Bo Rothstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a systematic analysis of how the understanding of corruption has evolved and pinpoints what constitutes corruption.

Download or read book Electoral Dynamics in Indonesia written by Edward Aspinall and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do politicians win elected office in Indonesia? To find out, research teams fanned out across the country prior to Indonesia’s 2014 legislative election to record campaign events, interview candidates and canvassers, and observe their interactions with voters. They found that at the grassroots political parties are less important than personal campaign teams and vote brokers who reach out to voters through a wide range of networks associated with religion, ethnicity, kinship, micro enterprises, sports clubs and voluntary groups of all sorts. Above all, candidates distribute patronage—cash, goods and other material benefits—to individual voters and to communities. Electoral Dynamics in Indonesia brings to light the scale and complexity of vote buying and the many uncertainties involved in this style of politics, providing an unusually intimate portrait of politics in a patronage-based system.

Download or read book Clientelism Capitalism and Democracy written by Didi Kuo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States and Britain, capitalists organized in opposition to clientelism and demanded programmatic parties and institutional reforms.

Download or read book The Politics of Patronage written by Benjamin Márquez and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded in 1968, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) is the Latino equivalent to the NAACP: a source of legal defense for the Latina/o community in cases centered on education, state immigration laws, redistricting, employment discrimination, and immigrant rights. Unlike the NAACP, however, MALDEF was founded by Mexican American activists in conjunction with the larger philanthropic structure of the Ford Foundation—a relationship that has opened it up to controversy and criticism. In the first book to examine this little-known but highly influential organization, Benjamin Márquez explores MALDEF’s history and shows how it has thrived and served as a voice for the Latina/o community throughout its sixty years of operation. But he also looks closely at large-scale investments of the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and others, considering how their ties to MALDEF have influenced Mexican American and Latinx politics. Its story crafted from copious research into MALDEF and its benefactors, this book brings to light the influence of outside funding on the articulation of minority identities and the problems that come with creating change through institutional means.

Download or read book Exchanging Symbols written by Anitra Nettleton and published by AFRICAN SUN MeDIA. This book was released on 2020-03-27 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book comprises eight essays that consider the politics and polemics of monuments in Africa in the wake of the #RhodesMustFall movement in 2015. The removal of the Rhodes statue from UCT main campus is the pivot on which the discussion of monuments as heritage in South Africa turns. It raised a number of questions about the implementation of heritage policy and the unequal deployment of memorials in the South African and other postcolonial landscapes. The essays in this volume are written by authors coming from different backgrounds and different disciplines. They address different aspects of this event and its aftermath, offering some intensive critique of existing monuments, analysing the successes of new initiatives, meditating on the visual resonances of all monuments and attempting to map ways of moving forward.

Download or read book Urban Poverty Local Governance and Everyday Politics in Mumbai written by Joop de Wit and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the informal patronage relations between urban slum-dwellers and service delivery organisations in Mumbai, India. It examines to what extent the people in the slums are subject to social and political exclusion. Delving into the roles of the slum-based mediators and local municipal councillors, it highlights the problems in the functioning of democracy at the ground level, as election candidates target vote banks with freebies and private sector funding to manage campaigns. It provides a comprehensive overview of the various actors within local municipal governance and democracy as also consequences for citizenship, urban poverty, public services and neo-liberal politics.

Download or read book Ending Africa s Energy Deficit and the Law written by Yinka Omorogbe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-09 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the inclusion of access to energy in the sustainable development goals, the role of energy to human existence was finally recognized. Yet, in Africa, this achievement is far from realized. Omorogbe and Ordor bring together experts in their fields to ask what is stalling progress, examining problems from institutions catering to vested interests at the continent's expense, to a need to develop vigorous financial and fiscal frameworks. The ramifications and complications of energy law are labyrinthine: this volume discusses how energy deficits can burden disabled people, women, and children in excess of their more fortunate counterparts, as well as considering environmental issues, including the delicate balance between the necessity of water for drinking and cleaning and the use of water in industrial processes. A pivotal work of scholarship, the book poses pressing questions for energy law and international human rights.

Download or read book Jobs for the Boys written by Merilee Grindle and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patronage systems in the public service are universally reviled as undemocratic and corrupt. Yet patronage was the prevailing method of staffing government for centuries, and in some countries it still is. In Jobs for the Boys, Merilee Grindle considers why patronage has been so ubiquitous in history and explores the political processes through which it is replaced by merit-based civil service systems. Such reforms are consistently resisted, she finds, because patronage systems, though capricious, offer political executives flexibility to achieve a wide variety of objectives. Grindle looks at the histories of public sector reform in six developed countries and compares them with contemporary struggles for reform in four Latin American countries. A historical, case-based approach allows her to take into account contextual differences between countries as well as to identify cycles that govern reform across the board. As a rule, she finds, transition to merit-based systems involves years and sometimes decades of conflict and compromise with supporters of patronage, as new systems of public service are politically constructed. Becoming aware of the limitations of public sector reform, Grindle hopes, will temper expectations for institutional change now being undertaken.

Download or read book Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective written by Marcel Paret and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Arab Uprising, to anti-austerity protests in Europe and the US Occupy Movement, to uprisings in Brazil and Turkey, resistance from below is flourishing. Whereas analysts have tended to look North in their analysis of the recent global protest wave, this volume develops a Southern perspective through a deep engagement with the case of South Africa, which has experienced widespread popular resistance for more than a decade. Combining critical theoretical perspectives with extensive qualitative fieldwork and rich case studies, Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective situates South Africa’s contentious democracy in relation to both the economic insecurity of contemporary global capitalism and the constantly shifting political terrain of post-apartheid nationalism. The analysis integrates worker, community and political party organizing into a broader narrative of resistance, bridging historical divisions between social movement studies, labor studies and political sociology.

Download or read book Patronage Power and Poverty in Southern Italy written by Judith Chubb and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the Italy of the 1980s, which represents an unparalleled example of dualistic development - deeply divided between North and South.

Download or read book Ethnic Leadership and Midwestern Politics written by Jørn Brøndal and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnic Leadership and Midwestern Politics investigates the notion of ethnic identity as it relates to Scandinavian Americans and political affiliations in Wisconsin, from 1890-1914. Jørn Brøndal traces the evolution of their political alliances as they move from an early patronage system to one of a more enlightened social awareness, prompted by the Wisconsin Progressives led by Robert M. La Follette. Brøndal's exceptionally thorough research and cogent arguments combine to explain the workings of a political system that accorded nationality a major role in politics at the expense of real political, social, and economic issues in the early 1890s, and how (and why) the Progressives determined to change that system. Brøndal explains the change by looking at several important Scandinavian-American institutions, including the church, mutual aid fraternities, the temperance movement, the Scandinavian-language press, political clubs, and labor and farmer organizations, showing how these institutions impacted the construction of a nascent sense of Scandinavian American national identity and made a lasting mark on the Scandinavian-American role in politics.

Download or read book Decolonisation after Democracy written by Laurence Piper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decolonisation after Democracy addresses the provocative idea that we need to rid higher education of lingering forms of colonial knowledge. This matters because in the colonial era much knowledge was put to the service of subjugating indigenous peoples, and the assumptions from this era may linger into the present. Examples of deep-rooted and ‘foundational’ forms of knowledge that carry colonial traits are normative binaries such as ‘civilised and backward’, ‘modern and traditional’ and ‘rational and superstitious’. In addition, some accounts of positive values like freedom, equality, justice and democracy may hide the assumption that the western experience is the norm, from which other kinds are rendered imitations, deviations or pathologies. In this collection, some of South Africa’s leading political scientists and academics engage with the challenge of decolonising knowledge in the research and teaching of politics. It includes new insights about the state, international relations, clientelism, statesociety relations and land reform; and introduces new ways to engage the colonial library, curriculum reform, and the marginality of historically black institutions. Finally, the contributors deal with the decolonial challenge posed by the #FeesMustFall student movements, reflecting on issues of revolutionary politics and gender and sexual violence. This book was originally published as a special issue of Politikon.

Download or read book The Increasingly United States written by Daniel J. Hopkins and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-05-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a campaign for state or local office these days, you’re as likely today to hear accusations that an opponent advanced Obamacare or supported Donald Trump as you are to hear about issues affecting the state or local community. This is because American political behavior has become substantially more nationalized. American voters are far more engaged with and knowledgeable about what’s happening in Washington, DC, than in similar messages whether they are in the South, the Northeast, or the Midwest. Gone are the days when all politics was local. With The Increasingly United States, Daniel J. Hopkins explores this trend and its implications for the American political system. The change is significant in part because it works against a key rationale of America’s federalist system, which was built on the assumption that citizens would be more strongly attached to their states and localities. It also has profound implications for how voters are represented. If voters are well informed about state politics, for example, the governor has an incentive to deliver what voters—or at least a pivotal segment of them—want. But if voters are likely to back the same party in gubernatorial as in presidential elections irrespective of the governor’s actions in office, governors may instead come to see their ambitions as tethered more closely to their status in the national party.