Download or read book Democracy and Political Ignorance written by Ilya Somin and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-02 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant of politics and government. Often, many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This may be rational, but it creates a nation of people with little political knowledge and little ability to objectively evaluate what they do know. In Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin mines the depths of ignorance in America and reveals the extent to which it is a major problem for democracy. Somin weighs various options for solving this problem, arguing that political ignorance is best mitigated and its effects lessened by decentralizing and limiting government. Somin provocatively argues that people make better decisions when they choose what to purchase in the market or which state or local government to live under, than when they vote at the ballot box, because they have stronger incentives to acquire relevant information and to use it wisely.
Download or read book Government and Business American Political Economy in Comparative Perspective written by Richard Lehne and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2012-03-23 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the nexus of government and business in some of the world's most prominent industrial nations, the author explores the strategies adopted by business to influence governmental acdtions and analyzes the public policies that bind business to the state.
Download or read book Why Government Can t Save You written by John F. MacArthur and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2000-09-16 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lord did not come as a political deliverer or social reformer. He did not rally supporters in a grandiose attempt to "capture the culture" for morality or greater political and religious freedom. Rather, His divine calling was to rescue the lost souls of individual men and women from sin and hell. In Why Government Can't Save You: An Alternative to Political Activism, author John MacArthur illustrates through Scripture that, regardless of the numerous immoral, unjuust, and ungodly failures of secular government, believers are to pray and seek to influence the world for Christ by godly, selfless, and peaceful living under that authority, not by protests against the government or by acts of civil disobedience. Dr. MacArthur will explore these areas: Christians' responsibility to authority How and why we should support our leaders How to live righteously in a pagan culture The principle of paying taxes Jesus' lessons on tax exemptions The biblical purpose of government The principle and reasons for civil obedience. "To devote all, or even most, of our time, energy, money, and strategy to putting a façade of morality on the world or the appearance of 'rightness' over our governmental and political institutions is to badly misunderstand our roles as Christians in a spiritually lost world." ?John MacArthur
Download or read book Maryland Politics and Government written by Herbert Charles Smith and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tucked between the larger commonwealths of Pennsylvania and Virginia and overshadowed by the political maneuverings of its neighbor, Washington, D.C., Maryland has often been overlooked and neglected in studies of state governmental systems. With the publication of Maryland Politics and Government, the challenging demographic diversity, geographic variety, and dynamic Democratic pragmatism of Maryland finally get their due. Two longtime political analysts, Herbert C. Smith and John T. Willis, conduct a sustained inquiry into topics including the Maryland identity, political history, and interest groups; the three branches of state government; and policy areas such as taxation, spending, transportation, and the environment. Smith and Willis also establish a –Two Marylands” model that explains the dominance of the Maryland Democratic Party, established in the post_Civil War era, that persists to this day even in a time of political polarization. Unique in its scope, detail, and coverage, Maryland Politics and Government sets the standard for understanding the politics of the Free State (or, alternately, the Old Line State) for years to come.
Download or read book Political Management written by Jennifer Lees-Marshment and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Management lays out the core tools to manage government, campaigns and parties. The first book to combine management concepts with politics and government, it provides core theories for what Political Planning, Political HR, Political Organising, Political Leadership and Political Reviewing involve, illustrated with high level political practitioner interviews, examples and political documents. The text presents the 4 Ds of Political Management - Deliberating, Designing, Doing and Dancing - to convey that Political Management is more of a dance than a march. Even presidents and prime ministers do not have enough formal authority to control the myriad of practitioners, players, processes and policies involved in 21st century governance. In this book, the author demonstrates why political practitioners in campaign teams, parties, government departments and political offices need political management tools to utilise the resources they have available and overcome multiple obstacles that practical politics presents. By offering a clear sense of what political management involves and providing the theoretical frameworks to be used in empirical research, this book will stimulate significant future study. It will be invaluable to practitioners, scholars and students in politics, government, policy, leadership, management, public administration, and political management.
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.
Download or read book In the Shadow of Justice written by Katrina Forrester and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the Shadow of Justice tells the story of how liberal political philosophy was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of John Rawls. In this first-ever history of contemporary liberal theory, Katrina Forrester shows how liberal egalitarianism--a set of ideas about justice, equality, obligation, and the state--became dominant, and traces its emergence from the political and ideological context of the postwar United States and Britain. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Rawls's A Theory of Justice made a particular kind of liberalism essential to political philosophy. Using archival sources, Forrester explores the ascent and legacy of this form of liberalism by examining its origins in midcentury debates among American antistatists and British egalitarians. She traces the roots of contemporary theories of justice and inequality, civil disobedience, just war, global and intergenerational justice, and population ethics in the 1960s and '70s and beyond. In these years, political philosophers extended, developed, and reshaped this liberalism as they responded to challenges and alternatives on the left and right--from the New International Economic Order to the rise of the New Right. These thinkers remade political philosophy in ways that influenced not only their own trajectory but also that of their critics. Recasting the history of late twentieth-century political thought and providing novel interpretations and fresh perspectives on major political philosophers, In the Shadow of Justice offers a rigorous look at liberalism's ambitions and limits."--
Download or read book The Political Economy of the Abe Government and Abenomics Reforms written by Takeo Hoshi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the politics and economics of the Abe government and evaluates major policies, such as Abenomics policy reforms.
Download or read book The American Political System written by Ken Kollman and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empirical puzzles get students thinking like political scientists.
Download or read book Dynamics of the Party System written by James L. Sundquist and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the original edition of Dynamics of the Party System was published in 1973, American politics have continued on a tumultuous course. In the vacuum left by the decline of the Democratic and Republican parties, single-interest groups have risen and flourished. Protest movements on the left and the New Right at the opposite pole have challenged and divided the major parties, and the Reagan Revolution--in reversing a fifty-year trend toward governmental expansion--may turn out to have revolutionized the party system too. In this edition, as in the first, current political trends and events are placed in a historical and theoretical context. Focusing upon three major realignments of the past--those of the 1850s, the 1890s, and the 1930s--Sundquist traces the processes by which basic transformations of the country's two-party system occur. From the historical case studies, he fashions a theory as to the why and how of party realignment, then applies it to current and recent developments, through the first two years of the Reagan presidency and the midterm election of 1982. The theoretical sections of the first edition are refined in this one, the historical sections are revised to take account of recent scholarship, and the chapters dealing with the postwar period are almost wholly rewritten. The conclusion of the original work is, in general, confirmed: the existing party system is likely to be strengthened as public attention is again riveted on domestic economic issues, and the headlong trend of recent decades toward political independence and party disintegration reversed, at least for a time.
Download or read book Private Government written by Elizabeth Anderson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.
Download or read book Transforming Political Leadership in Local Government written by R. Berg and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Local governments throughout the west are undergoing a transformation of their leadership styles and structures. Some countries have abandoned traditional systems of collective or committee based decision-making in favour of Cabinet models or, more radically, a directly-elected executive mayor, while others have strengthened existing mayoral systems. There are a few exceptions to this trend. Based on original research in eleven countries the book assesses these changes in terms of their implications for political accountability, the role of lay politicians, political recruitment, the professionalization of leadership, and relations with the bureaucracy.
Download or read book Super PACs written by Louise I. Gerdes and published by Greenhaven Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The passage of Citizens United by the Supreme Court in 2010 sparked a renewed debate about campaign spending by large political action committees, or Super PACs. Its ruling said that it is okay for corporations and labor unions to spend as much as they want in advertising and other methods to convince people to vote for or against a candidate. This book provides a wide range of opinions on the issue. Includes primary and secondary sources from a variety of perspectives; eyewitnesses, scientific journals, government officials, and many others.
Download or read book Political Parties and Constitutional Government written by Sidney M. Milkis and published by . This book was released on 1999-09-07 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. Constitution makes no mention of political parties, yet parties began to form shortly after its ratification. Today, American democracy would not work without them. In Political Parties and Constitutional Government, Sidney Milkis explores the uneasy relationship between the Constitution and the party system to advance a novel argument: political parties arose as part of a deliberate program of constitutional reform. Forged on the anvil of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, parties initially formed as decentralized political associations that engaged the attention of ordinary citizens and held presidents accountable to local constituencies. But as the power of the presidency and the federal government grew, parties shifted their attention from building political support in the states and localities to vying for control over national administration and, in the process, lost their vital connection to the electorate. In the past thirty years, partisan disputes have more often than not involved confrontations between the president and Congress that have undermined the public's respect for American political institutions. With the decline of localized parties, Milkis concludes, there has arisen an administrative politics of rights and entitlements that belittles the efforts of Democrats and Republicans alike to define a collective purpose. Ending with a discussion of possible methods of revitalization and reform, this timely book does much to explain the reasons behind Americans' disenchantment with parties and the party system.
Download or read book Democracy for Realists written by Christopher H. Achen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why our belief in government by the people is unrealistic—and what we can do about it Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate that voters—even those who are well informed and politically engaged—mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly. Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters. Now with new analysis of the 2016 elections, Democracy for Realists provides a powerful challenge to conventional thinking, pointing the way toward a fundamentally different understanding of the realities and potential of democratic government.
Download or read book The Submerged State written by Suzanne Mettler and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-08-31 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” Such comments spotlight a central question animating Suzanne Mettler’s provocative and timely book: why are many Americans unaware of government social benefits and so hostile to them in principle, even though they receive them? The Obama administration has been roundly criticized for its inability to convey how much it has accomplished for ordinary citizens. Mettler argues that this difficulty is not merely a failure of communication; rather it is endemic to the formidable presence of the “submerged state.” In recent decades, federal policymakers have increasingly shunned the outright disbursing of benefits to individuals and families and favored instead less visible and more indirect incentives and subsidies, from tax breaks to payments for services to private companies. These submerged policies, Mettler shows, obscure the role of government and exaggerate that of the market. As a result, citizens are unaware not only of the benefits they receive, but of the massive advantages given to powerful interests, such as insurance companies and the financial industry. Neither do they realize that the policies of the submerged state shower their largest benefits on the most affluent Americans, exacerbating inequality. Mettler analyzes three Obama reforms—student aid, tax relief, and health care—to reveal the submerged state and its consequences, demonstrating how structurally difficult it is to enact policy reforms and even to obtain public recognition for achieving them. She concludes with recommendations for reform to help make hidden policies more visible and governance more comprehensible to all Americans. The sad truth is that many American citizens do not know how major social programs work—or even whether they benefit from them. Suzanne Mettler’s important new book will bring government policies back to the surface and encourage citizens to reclaim their voice in the political process.
