Download or read book Rethinking Party Reform written by Fabio Wolkenstein and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The functioning of representative democracy crucially depends on political parties that mediate between citizens and the state. It is widely doubted, however, that contemporary parties can still perform this connective role. Taking seriously the ensuing challenges for representative democracy, Rethinking Party Reform advances a normative account of party reform, drawing on both democratic theory and political science scholarship on parties. Moving beyond purely descriptive or causal-analytical perspectives on party reform, the book clarifies on theoretical grounds why party reform is centrally important for the sustainability of established democracies, and what effective party reforms could look like in an age where most citizens look to parties with scepticism and distrust. In doing so, this book underlines in distinctive fashion why scholars and citizens should care about re-inventing and transforming political parties, resisting widespread tendencies of either declaring parties unreformable or theorising them out of the picture.
Download or read book Stronger Parties Stronger Democracy written by Ian Vandewalker and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political parties are a core ingredient of representative democracy. A robust debate has recently developed, however, concerning whether organized parties can still provide the sorts of democratic benefits they traditionally supplied to our political system and, if not, what to do about it. This paper examines these questions from the perspective of campaign finance law. We ask whether there are changes that can be made to the rules governing party fundraising and spending that will enhance parties’ democratic strengths without expanding the risks associated with unfettered money in politics. This paper is in no way intended to be the final word on party financing reform, to say nothing of the larger challenges parties face. However, our hope is that it will provide a framework to guide the discussion of policies that will make the parties better at what they do best: facilitating ordinary citizens’ engagement with the political process.
Download or read book Rethinking US Election Law written by Steven Mulroy and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent U.S. elections have defied nationwide majority preference at the White House, Senate, and House levels. This work of interdisciplinary scholarship explains how “winner-take-all” and single-member district elections make this happen, and what can be done to repair the system. Proposed reforms include the National Popular Vote interstate compact (presidential elections); eliminating the Senate filibuster; and proportional representation using Ranked Choice Voting for House, state, and local elections.
Download or read book Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform written by Xiaomei Chen and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The profound political, economic, and social changes in China in the second half of the twentieth century have produced a wealth of scholarship; less studied however is how cultural events, and theater reforms in particular, contributed to the dynamic landscape of contemporary Chinese society. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform fills this gap by investigating the theories and practice of socialist theater and their effects on a diverse range of genres, including Western-style spoken drama, Chinese folk opera, dance drama, Shanghai opera, Beijing opera, and rural theater. Focusing on the 1950s and ’60s, when theater art occupied a prominent political and cultural role in Maoist China, this book examines the efforts to remake theater in a socialist image. It explores the unique dynamics between official discourse, local politics, performance practice, and audience reception that emerged under the pressures of highly politicized cultural reform as well as the off-stage, lived impact of rapid policy change on individuals and troupes obscured by the public record. This multidisciplinary collection by leading scholars covers a wide range of perspectives, geographical locations, specific research methods, genres of performance, and individual knowledge and experience. The richly diverse approach leads readers through a nuanced and complex cultural landscape as it contributes significantly to our understanding of a crucial period in the development of modern Chinese theater and performance.
Download or read book Rethinking Democratic Innovation written by Frank Hendriks and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking Democratic Innovation takes a fresh look at diverging visions of improving democratic governance and asks whether these existing tensions could be made productive. Could different visions of democratic revitalisation complement and correct each other in ways that are good for democracy? Is it conceivable that combined approaches address a larger part of the democratic challenge, while isolated approaches, centralizing deliberative or plebiscitary democracy, are confined to more limited areas of concern? This book ultimately provides an affirmative answer, outlining the scope for hybrid democratic innovations that thrive on exploiting, not eliminating, tensions between diverging visions of improved democracy. Supplementing democratic theory with a cultural perspective, this book contributes to a deeper understanding of plans and methods geared toward improving democratic governance. Revisiting Mary Douglas's seminal take on culture as pollution reduction, processes of democratic innovation are understood as instances of cultural cleaning in public governance. The book recognizes that democratic cleaning will never be finished but can be done in ways that are more productive. Reflecting on varieties of hybrid democratic innovation - deliberative referendums, participatory budgeting-new style, and more - the author posits that more versatile, connective, and embedded innovations stand a better chance of high performance on a broader spectrum than democratic innovations falling short of these qualities.
Download or read book Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization written by Scott Mainwaring and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on an in-depth examination of the Brazillian case, this book argues that we need to rethink important theoretical issues and empirical realities of party systems in the third wave of democratization.
Download or read book Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period written by Rebecca E. Karl and published by Harvard Univ Asia Center. This book was released on 2002 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preliminary Material /Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow --Introduction /Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow --The Reform Movement, the Monarchy, and Political Modernity /Peter Zarrow --Literati-Journalists of the Chinese Progress (Shiwu bao) in Discord, 1896-1898 /Seungjoo Yoon --Zhang Zhidong's Proposal for Reform: A New Reading of the Quanxue pian /Tze-ki Hon --The Founding of the Imperial University and the Emergence of Ghinese Modernity /Timothy B. Weston --Placing the Hundred Days: Native-Place Ties and Urban Space /Richard Belsky --Reforming the Feminine: Female Literacy and the Legacy of 1898 /Joan Judge --Naming the First 'New Woman' /Hu Ying --'Slavery,' Citizenship, and Gender in Late Qing China's Global Context /Rebecca E. Karl --'Poetic Revolution,' Colonization, and Form at the Beginning of Modern Chinese Literature /Xiaobing Tang --Index /Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow --Harvard East Asian Monographs /Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow.
Download or read book The Inevitable Party written by Seth E. Masket and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seth Masket's The Inevitable Party is a study of anti-party reforms and why they fail. Numerous reform movements over the past century have designated parties as the enemy of democracy, and they have found a willing ally in the American people in their efforts to rein in and occasionally root out parties. Masket investigates several of these anti-party reform efforts - from open primaries to campaign finance restrictions to nonpartisan legislatures - using legislative roll call votes, campaign donations patterns, and extensive interviews with local political elites. These cases each demonstrate parties adapting to, and sometimes thriving amidst, reforms designed to weaken or destroy them. The reason for these reforms' failures, the book argues, is that they proceed from an incorrect conception of just what a party is. Parties are not rigid structures that can be wished or legislated away; they are networks of creative and adaptive policy demanders who use their influence to determine just what sorts of people get nominated for office. Even while these reforms tend to fail, however, they impose considerable costs on society, usually reducing transparency and accountability in politics and government.
Download or read book Party Reform and Political Realignment written by Adam David Hilton and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation offers an analysis of the New Politics movement to reform and realign the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The central problem is to develop an understanding of the origins, nature, and limits of the reform movement. This study also addresses questions regarding the interactive relationships between political parties and social movements, the capacity of social movement actors to transform party institutions to better influence American public policy, and the role of contingency and agency in moments of political crisis. Whereas many scholars have interpreted the New Politics movement as a conflict between amateurs and professionals or blue collar workers and white collar reformers, I offer an explanation that roots the New Politics reform project in the longer historical struggle over Democratic Party structure and programmatic identity going back to the early New Deal period. By placing the New Politics movement in its proper historical and institutional context, this dissertation draws on extensive archival research as well as participant interviews to reassess this episode of reform, not as an effort to dismantle the party but to renew it by transforming it into a party of a different type. This study finds that the New Politics movement, while scoring many important victories, such as including more women, young people, and people of color in the party hierarchy, failed in its ultimate ambition to build a national programmatic party due to the staunch opposition of state party leaders, cold war intellectuals, and especially the leadership of the trade union federation. This was due primarily to the labor movements own institutional position in the party, which channeled its influence through the smoke-filled back rooms of elite brokerage an arrangement which democratizing the party threatened. Rethinking the New Politics movement challenges the predominant narrative that treats the post-1980 reorientation of the Democratic Party toward the political center as the inevitable and common sense response to the excesses of the late 1960s. As I try to show, rather than the inexorable result of liberalisms failures, the making of the modern Democratic Party was the result of a struggle between contending political projects. While the New Politics did not succeed in winning that war, it did decisively shape the contours of Democratic Party politics today.
Download or read book Rethinking Parties in Democratizing Asia written by Julio C. Teehankee and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-04 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at eight case studies of Asian democracies, the contributors to this volume analyze the role of political parties in stabilizing and institutionalizing democracies. How have democracies such as Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines survived against the odds, despite struggling economic performance and highly unequal distribution of income? How have formerly authoritarian regimes in places like South Korea and Taiwan evolved into stable democracies? The contributors to this volume examine these case studies, along with Mongolia, Malaysia, and India, arguing that the common element is the extent to which political parties, including opposition parties, have become institutionalized and act as stabilizers on democracy. They contend that the role of political parties has been significantly underestimated in comparison with structural elements, which are insufficient to explain how these democracies have persisted. An essential resource for students and scholars of Asian politics, especially those with a focus on comparative politics, political parties, and institutions. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Funded by Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.
Download or read book Curing the Mischiefs of Faction written by Austin Ranney and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1976-01-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Democracy in Crisis written by Jeanne Sheehan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-02 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public disenchantment with and distrust of American government is at an all-time high and who can blame them? In the face of widespread challenges—everything from record levels of personal and national debt and the sky high cost of education, to gun violence, racial discrimination, an immigration crisis, overpriced pharmaceuticals, and much more—the government seems paralyzed and unable to act, the most recent example being Covid-19. It’s the deadliest pandemic in over a century. In addition to an unimaginable sick and death toll, it has left more than thirty million Americans unemployed. Despite this, Washington let the first round of supplemental unemployment benefits run out and for more than a month were unable to agree on a bill to help those suffering. This book explains why we are in this situation, why the government is unable to respond to key challenges, and what we can do to right the ship. It requires that readers “upstream,” stop blaming the individuals in office and instead look at the root cause of the problem. The real culprit is the system; it was designed to protect liberty and structured accordingly. As a result, however, it has left us with a government that is not responsive, largely unaccountable, and often ineffective. This is not an accident; it is by design. Changing the way our government operates requires rethinking its primary goal(s) and then restructuring to meet them. To this end, this book offers specific reform proposals to restructure the government and in the process make it more accountable, effective, and responsive.
Download or read book Rethinking Political Islam written by Shadi Hamid and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-17 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years, scholars hypothesized about what Islamists might do if they ever came to power. Now, they have answers: confusing ones. In the Levant, ISIS established a government by brute force, implementing an extreme interpretation of Islamic law. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Tunisia's Ennahda Party governed in coalition with two secular parties, ratified a liberal constitution, and voluntarily stepped down from power. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, the world's oldest Islamist movement, won power through free elections only to be ousted by a military coup. The strikingly disparate results of Islamist movements have challenged conventional wisdom on political Islam, forcing experts and Islamists to rethink some of their most basic assumptions. In Rethinking Political Islam, two of the leading scholars on Islamism, Shadi Hamid and William McCants, have gathered a group of leading specialists in the field to explain how an array of Islamist movements across the Middle East and Asia have responded. Unlike ISIS and other jihadist groups that garner the most media attention, these movements have largely opted for gradual change. Their choices, however, have been reshaped by the revolutionary politics of the region. The groups depicted in the volume capture the contradictions, successes, and failures of Islamism, providing a fascinating window into a rapidly changing Middle East. It is the first book to systematically assess the evolution of mainstream Islamist groups since the Arab uprisings and the rise of ISIS, covering 12 country cases. In each instance, contributors address key questions, including: gradual versus revolutionary approaches to change; the use of tactical or situational violence; attitudes toward the nation-state; and how ideology, religion, and political variables interact. For the first time in book form, readers will also hear directly from Islamist activists and leaders themselves, as they offer their own perspectives on the future of their movements. Islamists will have the opportunity to challenge the assumptions and arguments of some of the leading scholars of Islamism, in the spirit of constructive dialogue. Rethinking Political Islam includes three of the most important country cases outside the Middle East-Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan-allowing readers to consider a greater diversity of Islamist experiences. The book's contributors have immersed themselves in the world of political Islam and conducted original research in the field, resulting in rich accounts of what animates Islamist behavior.
Download or read book Rethinking Chinese Politics written by Joseph Fewsmith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive but accessible examination of how elite Chinese politics work covering the period from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping.
Download or read book Rethinking the Center written by and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1992-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From their beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century through the 1980's, political parties in Chile have displayed three discrete ideological tendencies, with two at opposite ends of the political spectrum and at least one in the center. This tripartite distribution made Chile's party system unlike any other in Latin America. How did Chile's distinctive system evolve? This book finds the answer in how three basic social cleavages--religious, urban, and rural--became polarized at three periods of critical juncture. Clerical-anticlerical conflict gave initial definition to the party system in the period 1857-61, and continued to shape the political arena long after specific issues had receded into the background. Then, between 1920 and 1932, class conflict in the urban and mining enclave sectors forced party elites to respond to the demands of leaders of middle-sector and working groups for increased political and social power. This was the second of what the author calls Chile's critical junctures for party formation. The third, occurring in the period 1952-58, saw the spread of working-class politics into the countryside. Crucial here was a shift in the position of the Catholic Church on class conflict, resulting in the emergence of an important Church-inspired center party. The book compares the behavior of the political center during the three historical periods and suggests a conceptual framework for understanding different types of center parties. The author also addresses certain questions raised by the emergence and behavior of center parties: What were the implications of the presence of a center party for the patterns of party competition? Why did the center emerge and re-emerge at each critical point in the evolution of Chile's party system? Can this be understood in terms of an underlying coalitional logic, or are factors such as leadership, political choice, and historical accident more useful explanations? Consistent with this focus on the center is a new account of the key role of the Christian Democrats in the reconstitution of party competition in the late 1980's and early 1990's. The author concludes by offering some observations on the probable shape of party politics--and the role of the political center within it--in tomorrow's Chile.
Download or read book Rethinking Political Institutions written by Ian Shapiro and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Institutions shape every dimension of politics. This volume collects original essays on how such institutions are formed, operated, and changed, both in theory and in practice. Ranging across formal institutions of government such as legislatures, courts, and bureaucracies and intermediary institutions such as labor unions and party systems, the contributors show how these instruments of control give shape to the state, articulate its relationships, and express its legitimacy. Rethinking Political Institutions captures the state of the art in the study of the art of the state. Drawing on some of the leading scholars in the field, this volume includes essays on issues of social power, public policy and programs, judicial review, and cross-national institutions. Rethinking Political Institutions is an essential addition to the debate on the significance of political institutions, in light of democracy, social change and power. Contributors: Elisabeth S. Clemens, Jon Elster, John Ferejohn, Terry M. Moe, Claus Offe, Paul Pierson, Ulrich K. Preuss, Rogers M. Smith, Kathleen Thelen, Mark Tushnet, R. Kent Weaver, Margaret Weir, Keith E. Whittington
Download or read book God Reforms Hearts written by Thaddeus Williams and published by Lexham Academic. This book was released on 2021-08-11 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Must we be free to truly love? Evil is a problem for all Christians. When responding to objections that both evil and God can exist, many resort to a "free will defense," where God is not the creator of evil but of human freedom, by which evil is possible. This response is so pervasive that it is just as often assumed as it is defended. But is this answer biblically and philosophically defensible? In God Reforms Hearts, Thaddeus J. Williams offers a friendly challenge to the central claim of the free will defense—that love is possible only with true (or libertarian) free will. Williams argues that much thinking on free will fails to carve out the necessary distinction between an autonomous will and an unforced will. Scripture presents a God who desires relationship and places moral requirements on his often--rebellious creatures, but does absolute free will follow? Moreover, God's work of transforming the human heart is more thorough than libertarian freedom allows. With clarity, precision, and charity, Williams judges the merits and shortcomings of the relational free will defense while offering a philosophically and biblically robust alternative that draws from theologians of the past to point a way forward.
