Download or read book Why Bother With Elections written by Adam Przeworski and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-01-16 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the collapse of traditional parties around the world and with many pundits predicting a "crisis of democracy", the value of elections as a method for selecting by whom and how we are governed is being questioned. What are the virtues and weaknesses of elections? Are there limitations to what they can realistically achieve? In this deeply informed book world-renowned democratic theorist Adam Przeworski offers a warts-and-all analysis of elections and the ways in which they affect our lives. Elections, he argues, are inherently imperfect but they remain the least bad way of choosing our rulers. According to Przeworski, the greatest value of elections, by itself sufficient to cherish them, is that they process whatever conflicts may arise in society in a way that maintains relative liberty and peace. Whether they succeed in doing so in today's turbulent political climate remains to be seen.
Download or read book Why Bother written by S. Erdem Aytaç and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using surveys, experiments, and fieldwork from several countries, this book tests a new theory of participation in elections and protests.
Download or read book Why Bother With Elections written by Adam Przeworski and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-16 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the collapse of traditional parties around the world and with many pundits predicting a "crisis of democracy", the value of elections as a method for selecting by whom and how we are governed is being questioned. What are the virtues and weaknesses of elections? Are there limitations to what they can realistically achieve? In this deeply informed book world-renowned democratic theorist Adam Przeworski offers a warts-and-all analysis of elections and the ways in which they affect our lives. Elections, he argues, are inherently imperfect but they remain the least bad way of choosing our rulers. According to Przeworski, the greatest value of elections, by itself sufficient to cherish them, is that they process whatever conflicts may arise in society in a way that maintains relative liberty and peace. Whether they succeed in doing so in today's turbulent political climate remains to be seen.
Download or read book Electoral Dysfunction written by Victoria Bassetti and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine a country where the right to vote is not guaranteed by the Constitution, where the candidate with the most votes loses, and where paperwork requirements and bureaucratic bungling disenfranchise millions. You're living in it. If the consequences weren't so serious, it would be funny. A concise handbook designed as a fact-filled companion to the forthcoming PBS documentary starring political satirist and commentator Mo Rocca, Electoral Dysfunction illuminates a broad array of issues, including: the Founding Fathers' decision to omit the right to vote from the Constitution—and the legal system's patchwork response to this omission; the battle over voter ID, voter impersonation, and voter fraud; the foul-ups that plague Election Day, from ballot design to contested recounts; the role of partisan officials in running elections; and the antidemocratic origins and impact of the Electoral College. The book concludes with a prescription for a healthy voting system crafted by leading voting-reform experts, whose agenda for change includes a call for universal voter registration and unform national standards. Published in the run-up to the 2012 election, Electoral Dysfunction is for readers across the political spectrum who want their vote to count.
Download or read book How to Rig an Election written by Nic Cheeseman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing analysis of the pseudo-democratic methods employed by despots around the world to retain control Contrary to what is commonly believed, authoritarian leaders who agree to hold elections are generally able to remain in power longer than autocrats who refuse to allow the populace to vote. In this engaging and provocative book, Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas expose the limitations of national elections as a means of promoting democratization, and reveal the six essential strategies that dictators use to undermine the electoral process in order to guarantee victory for themselves. Based on their firsthand experiences as election watchers and their hundreds of interviews with presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, election officials, and conspirators, Cheeseman and Klaas document instances of election rigging from Argentina to Zimbabwe, including notable examples from Brazil, India, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States—touching on the 2016 election. This eye-opening study offers a sobering overview of corrupted professional politics, while providing fertile intellectual ground for the development of new solutions for protecting democracy from authoritarian subversion.
Download or read book Chaotic Elections written by Donald Saari and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 2001-04-03 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does the 2000 U.S. presidential election have in common with selecting a textbook for a calculus course in your department? Was Ralph Nader's influence on the election of George W. Bush greater than the now-famous chads? In Chaotic Elections!, Don Saari analyzes these questions, placing them in the larger context of voting systems in general. His analysis shows that the fundamental problems with the 2000 presidential election are not with the courts, recounts, or defective ballots, but are caused by the very way Americans vote for president. This expository book shows how mathematics can help to identify and characterize a disturbingly large number of paradoxical situations that result from the choice of a voting procedure. Moreover, rather than being able to dismiss them as anomalies, the likelihood of a dubious election result is surprisingly large. These consequences indicate that election outcomes--whether for president, the site of the next Olympics, the chair of a university department, or a prize winner--can differ from what the voters really wanted. They show that by using an inadequate voting procedure, we can, inadvertently, choose badly. To add to the difficulties, it turns out that the mathematical structures of voting admit several strategic opportunities, which are described. Finally, mathematics also helps identify positive results: By using mathematical symmetries, we can identify what the phrase ``what the voters really want'' might mean and obtain a unique voting method that satisfies these conditions. Saari's book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand not only what happened in the presidential election of 2000, but also how we can avoid similar problems from appearing anytime any group is making a choice using a voting procedure. Reading this book requires little more than high school mathematics and an interest in how the apparently simple situation of voting can lead to surprising paradoxes.
Download or read book At Any Cost written by Bill Sammon and published by Regnery Publishing. This book was released on 2002-09-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes Al Gore's efforts to overturn the results of the 2000 presidential election, including his attempts to toss military ballots and his campaign against Florida attorney general Katherine Harris.
Download or read book Comparing Democracies written by Lawrence LeDuc and published by SAGE Publications, Incorporated. This book was released on 1996-08-29 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 11. Leaders - Ian McAllister
Download or read book Why Bother written by S. Erdem Aytaç and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do vote-suppression efforts sometimes fail? Why does police repression of demonstrators sometimes turn localized protests into massive, national movements? How do politicians and activists manipulate people's emotions to get them involved? The authors of Why Bother? offer a new theory of why people take part in collective action in politics, and test it in the contexts of voting and protesting. They develop the idea that just as there are costs of participation in politics, there are also costs of abstention - intrinsic and psychological but no less real. That abstention can be psychically costly helps explain real-world patterns that are anomalies for existing theories, such as that sometimes increases in costs of participation are followed by more participation, not less. The book draws on a wealth of survey data, interviews, and experimental results from a range of countries, including the United States, Britain, Brazil, Sweden, and Turkey.
Download or read book Crises of Democracy written by Adam Przeworski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-26 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the economic, social, cultural, as well as purely political threats to democracy in the light of current knowledge.
Download or read book The Big Vote written by Liette Gidlow and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2007-03-15 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cultural history of voter turnout campaigns in early 20th century America sheds light on the problems that persist in democratic participation today. In the 1920s, America experienced low voter turnout at a level not seen in nearly a century. Reformers responded by launching massive campaigns to "Get Out the Vote.” Yet while these campaigns advocated civic participation, they also promoted an exclusionary message that transformed America’s political culture. By the late 1920s, "civic" would be practically synonymous with "middle class" and "white." At the time, weakened political parties, ascendant consumer culture, labor unrest, Jim Crow, widespread anti-immigration sentiment, and the new woman suffrage all raised serious questions about the meaning of good citizenship. Through techniques ranging from civic education to modern advertising, middle-class and elite whites worked in the realm of culture to undo the equality that constitutional amendments had seemed to achieve. Richly documented with primary sources from political parties and civic groups, popular and ethnic periodicals, and electoral returns, The Big Vote examines the national Get-Out-the-Vote campaigns as well as the internal dynamics of specific campaigns in New York City, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Birmingham, Alabama.
Download or read book What s the Matter with Kansas written by Thomas Frank and published by Picador. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of "our most insightful social observers"* cracks the great political mystery of our time: how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank turns his eye on what he calls the "thirty-year backlash"—the populist revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment. The high point of that backlash is the Republican Party's success in building the most unnatural of alliances: between blue-collar Midwesterners and Wall Street business interests, workers and bosses, populists and right-wingers. In asking "what 's the matter with Kansas?"—how a place famous for its radicalism became one of the most conservative states in the union—Frank, a native Kansan and onetime Republican, seeks to answer some broader American riddles: Why do so many of us vote against our economic interests? Where's the outrage at corporate manipulators? And whatever happened to middle-American progressivism? The questions are urgent as well as provocative. Frank answers them by examining pop conservatism—the bestsellers, the radio talk shows, the vicious political combat—and showing how our long culture wars have left us with an electorate far more concerned with their leaders' "values" and down-home qualities than with their stands on hard questions of policy. A brilliant analysis—and funny to boot—What's the Matter with Kansas? presents a critical assessment of who we are, while telling a remarkable story of how a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs came to convince a nation that they spoke on behalf of the People. *Los Angeles Times
Download or read book A Behavioral Theory of Elections written by Jonathan Bendor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-06 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most theories of elections assume that voters and political actors are fully rational. This title provides a behavioral theory of elections based on the notion that all actors - politicians as well as voters - are only boundedly rational.
Download or read book Real Choices new Voices written by Douglas J. Amy and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a growing realization that many of the problems afflicting American elections can be traced to the electoral system itself, in particular to our winner-take-all approach to electing officials. Douglas Amy demonstrates that switching to proportional representation elections--the voting system used in most other Western democracies, by which officials are elected in large, multimember districts according to the proportion of the vote won by their parties--would enliven democratic political debate, increase voter choice and voter turnout, ensure fair representation for third parties and minorities, eliminate wasted votes and "spoliers," and ultimately produce policies that better reflect the public will. Looking beyond new voting machines and other quick fixes for our electoral predicament, this new edition of Real Choices/New Voices offers a timely and imaginative way out of the frustrations of our current system of choosing leaders.
Download or read book Too Young to Run written by John Evan Seery and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines the history, theory, and politics behind the age qualifications for elected federal office in the United States Constitution. Argues that the right to run for office ought to be extended to all adult-age citizens who are otherwise office-eligible"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Should Secret Voting Be Mandatory written by James Johnson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The secrecy of the ballot, a crucial basic element of representative democracy, is under threat. Attempts to make voting more convenient in the face of declining turnout – and the rise of the “ballot selfie” – are making it harder to guarantee secrecy. Leading scholars James Johnson and Susan Orr go back to basics to analyze the fundamental issues surrounding the secret ballot, showing how secrecy works to protect voters from coercion and bribery. They argue, however, that this protection was always incomplete: faced with effective ballot secrecy, powerful actors turned to manipulating turnout – buying presence or absence at the polls – to obtain their electoral goals. The authors proceed to show how making both voting and voting in secret mandatory would foreclose both undue influence and turnout manipulation. This would enhance freedom for voters by liberating them from coercion or bribery in their choice of both whether and how to vote. This thought-provoking and insightful text will be invaluable for students and scholars of democratic theory, elections and voting, and political behavior.
Download or read book How Dictatorships Work written by Barbara Geddes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how dictatorships rise, survive, and fall, along with why some but not all dictators wield vast powers.
