Download or read book Bootstrapping Democracy written by Gianpaolo Baiocchi and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates participatory budgeting—a mainstay now of World Bank, UNDP, and USAID development programs—to ask whether its reforms truly make a difference in deepening democracy and empowering civil society.
Download or read book Design as Democracy written by David de la Pena and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2017-12-07 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we design places that fulfill urgent needs of the community, achieve environmental justice, and inspire long-term stewardship? By bringing community members to the table with designers to collectively create vibrant, important places in cities and neighborhoods. For decades, participatory design practices have helped enliven neighborhoods and promote cultural understanding. Yet, many designers still rely on the same techniques that were developed in the 1950s and 60s. These approaches offer predictability, but hold waning promise for addressing current and future design challenges. Design as Democracy is written to reinvigorate democratic design, providing inspiration, techniques, and case stories for a wide range of contexts. Edited by six leading practitioners and academics in the field of participatory design, with nearly 50 contributors from around the world, it offers fresh insights for creating meaningful dialogue between designers and communities and for transforming places with justice and democracy in mind.
Download or read book Transforming India written by Sumantra Bose and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-09 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A nation of 1.25 billion people composed of numerous ethnic, linguistic, religious, and caste communities, India is the world’s most diverse democracy. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork and experience of Indian politics, Sumantra Bose tells the story of democracy’s evolution in India since the 1950s—and describes the many challenges it faces in the early twenty-first century. Over the past two decades, India has changed from a country dominated by a single nationwide party into a robust multiparty and federal union, as regional parties and leaders have risen and flourished in many of India’s twenty-eight states. The regionalization of the nation’s political landscape has decentralized power, given communities a distinct voice, and deepened India’s democracy, Bose finds, but the new era has also brought fresh dilemmas. The dynamism of India’s democracy derives from the active participation of the people—the demos. But as Bose makes clear, its transformation into a polity of, by, and for the people depends on tackling great problems of poverty, inequality, and oppression. This tension helps explain why Maoist revolutionaries wage war on the republic, and why people in the Kashmir Valley feel they are not full citizens. As India dramatically emerges on the global stage, Transforming India: Challenges to the World’s Largest Democracy provides invaluable analysis of its complexity and distinctiveness.
Download or read book Democracy by Petition written by Daniel Carpenter and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering work of political history recovers the central and largely forgotten role that petitioning played in the formative years of North American democracy. Known as the age of democracy, the nineteenth century witnessed the extension of the franchise and the rise of party politics. As Daniel Carpenter shows, however, democracy in America emerged not merely through elections and parties, but through the transformation of an ancient political tool: the petition. A statement of grievance accompanied by a list of signatures, the petition afforded women and men excluded from formal politics the chance to make their voices heard and to reshape the landscape of political possibility. Democracy by Petition traces the explosion and expansion of petitioning across the North American continent. Indigenous tribes in Canada, free Blacks from Boston to the British West Indies, Irish canal workers in Indiana, and Hispanic settlers in territorial New Mexico all used petitions to make claims on those in power. Petitions facilitated the extension of suffrage, the decline of feudal land tenure, and advances in liberty for women, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Even where petitioners failed in their immediate aims, their campaigns advanced democracy by setting agendas, recruiting people into political causes, and fostering aspirations of equality. Far more than periodic elections, petitions provided an everyday current of communication between officeholders and the people. The coming of democracy in America owes much to the unprecedented energy with which the petition was employed in the antebellum period. By uncovering this neglected yet vital strand of nineteenth-century life, Democracy by Petition will forever change how we understand our political history.
Download or read book Transforming Korean Politics written by Young Whan Kihl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past fifteen years, South Korea has transformed itself from an authoritarian government into a new democracy with a vibrant capitalist economy. Modernization, democratization, and globalization have played important roles in this transformation, and have greatly influenced the programs and policies of Korea's Sixth Republic. Covering developments through the 2003 elections, this book shows how the South Korean government and society have been shaped not only by the dynamics of these forces, but also by their interaction with the cultural norms of a post-Confucian society. The author provides a conceptual framework and baseline for examining political developments in Korea, and offers an analysis of the factors that are transforming Korean institutions, society, and politics. He discusses the forces shaping Korea's political economy and the performance of successive ROK governments, and also highlights the challenges faced by the newly elected administration of Roh Moo Huan, the North Korean issue, and more.
Download or read book Deep Democracy written by Judith M. Green and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1999 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deeply understood, democracy is more than a formal institutional framework for which America provides the model, acting as a preferable alternative to the modern totalitarian regimes that have distorted social life around the world. At its core, as John Dewey understood, democracy is a realistic ideal, a desired and desirable future possibility that is yet-to-be. In this period of global crises in differing cultures, a shared environment, and an increasingly globalised political economy, this book provides a clear contemporary articulation of deep democracy that can guide an evolutionary deepening of democratic institutions, of habits of the heart, and of the processes of education and social inquiry they support them.
Download or read book Accelerating Democracy written by John O. McGinnis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how politicians and citizens can use technology to enhance American democracy.
Download or read book Digital Democracy Analogue Politics written by Nanjala Nyabola and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the upheavals of recent national elections to the success of the #MyDressMyChoice feminist movement, digital platforms have already had a dramatic impact on political life in Kenya – one of the most electronically advanced countries in Africa. While the impact of the Digital Age on Western politics has been extensively debated, there is still little appreciation of how it has been felt in developing countries such as Kenya, where Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and other online platforms are increasingly a part of everyday life. Written by a respected Kenyan activist and researcher at the forefront of political online struggles, this book presents a unique contribution to the debate on digital democracy. For traditionally marginalised groups, particularly women and people with disabilities, digital spaces have allowed Kenyans to build new communities which transcend old ethnic and gender divisions. But the picture is far from wholly positive. Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics explores the drastic efforts being made by elites to contain online activism, as well as how 'fake news', a failed digital vote-counting system and the incumbent president's recruitment of Cambridge Analytica contributed to tensions around the 2017 elections. Reframing digital democracy from the African perspective, Nyabola's ground-breaking work opens up new ways of understanding our current global online era.
Download or read book New Democracy written by William J. Novak and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America. In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. The last time American public life had been so thoroughly altered was in the late eighteenth century, at the founding and in the years immediately following. William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated peopleÕs rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power. Arguing against the myth that America was a weak state until the New Deal, New Democracy traces a steadily aggrandizing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was flexing power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognized, putting the lie to libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.
Download or read book The Transformation of Democracy written by Robert Kelley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining a thorough introduction to the work of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Italian social theo-rist Vilfredo Pareto with a highly read-able English translation of Pareto's last monograph, "Generalizations," origi-nally published in 1920, this work illus-trates precisely how and why demo-cratic forms of government undergo decay and are eventually re-invigo-rated. More than any other social scien-tist of his generation, Pareto offers a well-developed, articulate, and com-pelling theory of change based on a Newtonian vision of science and an en-gineering model of social equilibrium. In his introduction, Powers focusses on Pareto's intellectual maturation and on his overall theory of society. Powers describes the various stages of Pareto's development as engineer, economist, political scientist, and finally as sociol-ogist. He explains how Pareto consid-ered himself the Einstein of social sci-ence and how he introduced the con-cept of relativity into the social sci-ences. Even if such self-claims were rarely widely shared, the sense of Pareto's originality is doubted by few, if any, contemporary scholars. This last, and in many ways most penetrat-ing, of Pareto's briefer works, warns of the dangers which can befall demo-cratic order. It is important because, as his final attempt to clarify his ideas, it places his earlier works in perspective. Pareto generates a comprehensive the-ory of complex social phenomena.
Download or read book Rise of Democracy written by Christopher Hobson and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores democracy's remarkable rise from obscurity to centre stage in contemporary international relations, from the rogue democratic state of 18th Century France to Western pressures for countries throughout the world to democratise.
Download or read book Transformation Toward a People s Democracy written by Suzanne Pharr and published by Virginia Tech Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transformation: Toward a People’s Democracy is a movement book for anyone working for an expansive vision of social justice. Here Suzanne Pharr offers a clear and compelling vision for action amid social and political turmoil. Drawing on decades of work on the frontlines of social movements, Pharr’s writings create a real-time chronicle of on-the-ground organizing and the historical significance of struggles for freedom and democracy. Pharr, a Southern queer feminist and anti-racist organizer, explores the pitfalls and the strengths within social justice movements. Her writings reflect the interchange of ideas and the collective work of thinkers and organizers who led activists to lift up the liberation of gender and sexuality, to fight both domestic and state violence, to advance anti-racist strategies and the leadership of people of color, to work against the advancement of rapacious capitalism, and to confront the rise of the Right in all of its forms. Transformation examines not just what happened but how it happened in the battles against numerous forms of oppression including economic injustice, racism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, and nationalism. Taken together, Pharr’s writings give activists and scholars a way to understand decades of attacks on civil rights while offering a roadmap that shows the way toward a people’s democracy where everyone has full participation, voice, a fair share of the benefits, justice, and dignity.
Download or read book Supercapitalism written by Robert B. Reich and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-09-04 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of America's foremost economic and political thinkers comes a vital analysis of our new hypercompetitive and turbo-charged global economy and the effect it is having on American democracy. With his customary wit and insight, Reich shows how widening inequality of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and corporate corruption are merely the logical results of a system in which politicians are more beholden to the influence of business lobbyists than to the voters who elected them. Powerful and thought-provoking, Supercapitalism argues that a clear separation of politics and capitalism will foster an enviroment in which both business and government thrive, by putting capitalism in the service of democracy, and not the other way around.
Download or read book Transforming Post Communist Political Economies written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1998-03-02 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking new volume focuses on the interaction between political, social, and economic change in Central and Eastern Europe and the New Independent States. It includes a wide selection of analytic papers, thought-provoking essays by leading scholars in diverse fields, and an agenda for future research. It integrates work on the micro and macro levels of the economy and provides a broad overview of the transition process. This volume broadens the current intellectual and policy debate concerning the historic transition now taking place from a narrow concern with purely economic factors to the dynamics of political and social change. It questions the assumption that the post-communist economies are all following the same path and that they will inevitably develop into replicas of economies in the advanced industrial West. It challenges accepted thinking and promotes the utilization of new methods and perspectives.
Download or read book Digital Disconnect written by Robert W. McChesney and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world. McChesney's award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect McChesney returns to this provocative thesis in light of the advances of the digital age, incorporating capitalism into the heart of his analysis. He argues that the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology and proprietary systems, and other policies and massive indirect subsidies have made the Internet a place of numbing commercialism. A small handful of monopolies now dominate the political economy, from Google, which garners an astonishing 97 percent share of the mobile search market, to Microsoft, whose operating system is used by over 90 percent of the world's computers. This capitalistic colonization of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism, and made the Internet an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance, and a disturbingly anti-democratic force. In Digital Disconnect Robert McChesney offers a groundbreaking analysis and critique of the Internet, urging us to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.
Download or read book To Serve a Larger Purpose written by John Saltmarsh and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-20 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To Serve a Larger Purpose" calls for the reclamation of the original democratic purposes of civic engagement and examines the requisite transformation of higher education required to achieve it. The contributors to this timely and relevant volume effectively highlight the current practice of civic engagement and point to the institutional change needed to realize its democratic ideals. Using multiple perspectives, "To Serve a Larger Purpose" explores the democratic processes and purposes that reorient civic engagement to what the editors call "democratic engagement." The norms of democratic engagement are determined by values such as inclusiveness, collaboration, participation, task sharing, and reciprocity in public problem solving and an equality of respect for the knowledge and experience that everyone contributes to education, knowledge generation, and community building. This book shrewdly rethinks the culture of higher education.
Download or read book Democracy Transformed written by Bruce E. Cain and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text assembles the evidence of how democratic institutions and processes are changing and considers the larger implications of these reforms for the nature of democracy. The findings point to a new style of democratic politics that expands the nature of democracy.
