Download or read book Why Democracies Flounder and Fail written by Michael Haas and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy is in crisis because voices of the people are ignored due to a politics of mass society. After demonstrating how the French Fourth Republic failed, wherein Singapore’s totalitarianism is a dangerous model, Washington is enmeshed in gridlock, and there is a global democracy deficit, solutions are offered to revitalize democracy as the best form of government. The book demonstrates how mass society politics operates, with intermediate institutions of civil society (media, pressure groups, political parties) no longer transmitting the will of the people to government but instead are concerned with corporate interests and have developed oligarchical mindsets. Rather than micro-remedy bandaids, the author focuses on the need to transform governing philosophies from pragmatic to humanistic solutions.
Download or read book The Myth of Democratic Failure written by Donald A. Wittman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Myth of Democratic Failure, Donald A. Wittman refutes one of the cornerstone beliefs of economics and political science: that economic markets are more efficient than the processes and institutions of democratic government.
Download or read book Why Democracies Fail written by Norman L. Stamps and published by [Notre Dame, Ind.] University of Notre Dame Press. This book was released on 1957 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Party System Changes and Challenges to Democracy written by Danica Fink-Hafner and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book focuses on the nexus between “party system stability” and “democratic consolidation”, using Slovenia as a case study. Its findings are presented from a comparative perspective to illustrate the commonalities and differences found in research on Central European post-socialist countries and former Yugoslav countries. On the one hand, Slovenia’s characteristics (including the characteristics of its transition to democracy) are far more similar to those of Central European post-socialist countries than Western Balkan countries. On the other, Slovenia shares some similarities with other parts of the former Yugoslavia – especially its experiences with the political system of socialist self-management, elements of a market economy under socialism, and war following the end of socialism (albeit the conflict in Slovenia was very short and rather mild in comparison to those in other parts of socialist Yugoslavia). Slovenia’s experiences with rapid but limited democratic backsliding under the Janša government (March 2019–June 2022) were halted by the 2022 national election – in contrast to the more widely known cases of Hungary and Poland, where such backsliding took place incrementally over a longer period of time that included several election cycles. Danica Fink-Hafner is Professor at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Download or read book Beyond Polarized American Democracy written by Michael Haas and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-11 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil war in the United States is now a mainstream topic due to apparent signs of ongoing planning. This book reveals why in several ways. First, four major ideological drivers of possible conflict are identified. Next, ten arenas of ongoing nonviolent civil war are traced as increasingly for micro-level violence. Then several dozen alternative scenarios are traced to explain how civil war could break out very soon. Finally, measures are delineated about how the country might prevent calamity. Anarchists, Christian Nationalists, Libertarians, and Triumphalists are determined to impose their views on the diverse nation and reduce opponents to second-class status. They demonstrate their blatant determination through nonviolent political contests involving conspiracy theories, cultural differences, verbal contestation, anti-elitism, racism, well-armed groups with nationwide membership, political demonization, media disinformation, Congressional hyperpartisanship, reducing constitutional rights, and legal fights by some states against others. But often they go beyond and commit violence out of sheer enjoyment in making opponents suffer. Beyond Polarized American Democracy: From Mass Society to Coups and Civil War suggests remedies for each of ten types of nonviolent civil war, but most are long-term solutions that cannot deal with an imminent threat. Accordingly, the book reviews governmental and military resources as well as efforts to counteract the ideological contest through political innovations. The analysis flows from the sociological Mass Society Paradigm, which argues that democracy’s survival depends upon the ability of civil society to relay the needs of the people to institutions of government and provide effective pressure for corrective action. As developed to explain the rise of Nazism in Germany, the analysis applies lessons from studies of coups and civil wars to identify how to prevent the loss of democracy in the United States.
Download or read book Is Democracy Failing written by Niheer Dasandi and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only four countries around the world do not currently define themselves as democracies. But many more do not fulfil the four basic requirements of democracy: free and fair elections, active participation of citizens in politics, protection of human rights, and the rule of law. Since 2015, far-right and populist politicians have been on the rise throughout the West. Is populism the new face of democracy? Is democracy simply the will of the people? Can any existing government claim to be truly democratic? This captivating, articulate volume explores and interrogates each form of democracy and questions whether they remain fit for purpose today.
Download or read book Rome and America written by Dean Hammer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This Roman polish, and this smooth behaviour, That render man thus tractable and tame? Are they not only to disguise our passions, To set our looks at variance with our thoughts, To check the starts and sallies of the soul, And break off all its commerce with the tongue; In short, to change us into other creatures, Than what our nature and the gods designed us? (Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy, I, 4, 40-47) What have we been changed into? Amidst Rome's civil war, the Numidian general, Syphax, questions the effects of Romanization endorsed by Numa, the prince of Numidia and ally of Cato the Younger in the fight against Caesar. This question is unsettling in part because answering it begins to undermine an assumption about the past upon which the question rests. The more one pushes the question, the more one realizes that there is no absolute beginning point, no from, but only ongoing experiences and memories that almost imperceptibly connect to identities. Yet cultures attempt to answer the question of identity definitively. Cultures naturalize, lending normativity to beliefs and actions that form identity. And cultures narrativize, giving constancy to identity over time. The assumptions that underlie these narratives - the symbolic resources that a culture draws on - rest in the background as something already familiar within which one remembers, makes sense of experiences, and forms 12 expectations. To ask about these assumptions unsettles, laying bare the anxieties that underlie the question, "Who are We?" We answer the question for America through familiar European categories that grow out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Questions of the American founding are organized around debates about its republican, liberal, or religious heritage. The space, itself, appears as an empty state of nature in which a new history (absent a feudal past) can begin. Belonging appears as a formal feature of the integrated nation-state (notably, citizenship) that is comprised of constitutional rights and sustained by market interactions. And the future is envisioned as a narrative of progress of reason, science, wealth, and rights. Early American social actors and observers defined it this way; scholars analyze America in these terms"--
Download or read book Professionalization of Foreign Policy written by Michael Haas and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-10-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book identifies why presidents, prime ministers, and other leaders of countries often make blunders in foreign policy. Blunders have been recognized within the study of foreign policy, but no central methodology or theory has developed to provide a way to avoid future disasters. Options are often presented to leaders of countries by advisers who do not always assess which policies will best serve national interests. Presidents, prime ministers, and other leaders of countries then have their legacy judged accordingly. Therefore, the book reviews existing efforts at developing theories of foreign policy to determine why they have failed. Instead of allowing a discipline with a lot of competing theories to continue to flounder, the book consolidates all approaches and develops a new professional format that will serve to professionalize foreign policy decision-making so that fewer key decisions are ever again considered blunders.
Download or read book Rural Economic Developments and Social Movements written by Rita Vilkė and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the demands of the new innovative, sustainable and inclusive rural development paradigm, the monograph raises the discussion regarding new approaches and success factors that are vital in current rural socio-economic development and policy transformations. The bottom-up policymaking, self-organization, creative use of knowledge in rural areas, and many other rural innovations are aligned in this book with new social movements’ theories, which help disclose, explore and explain the rural development paradigm shift. Rural development forces of the 21st century center on the agents of change - rural population, and, surprisingly - urban population(!), and the political debate concerning EU Common Agricultural Policy and European Green Deal, illustrated with multiple case studies. This book will be of interest to a broad audience of readers, keen on scientific, political, and practical issues of innovations in rural areas and their future development pathways. The monograph is authored by a team of scholars from the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, Institute of Economics and Rural Development, Department of Rural Development.
Download or read book Handbook of Forensic Social Work written by David Axlyn McLeod and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Forensic social work is a unique practice field that interfaces with criminal justice or legal systems at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels of practice. This Handbook provides important reference content while exploring the multiple facets of the justice system, the differential nature of people, families, and communities navigating it, and the various ways social workers interface with the criminal justice system and associated client populations. The Handbook is an accessible resource for social workers that synthesizes current research and practice in forensic areas"--
Download or read book Knowledge Resistance in High Choice Information Environments written by Jesper Strömbäck and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-05-23 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a truly interdisciplinary exploration of our patterns of engagement with politics, news, and information in current high-choice information environments. Putting forth the notion that high-choice information environments may contribute to increasing misperceptions and knowledge resistance rather than greater public knowledge, the book offers insights into the processes that influence the supply of misinformation and factors influencing how and why people expose themselves to and process information that may support or contradict their beliefs and attitudes. A team of authors from across a range of disciplines address the phenomena of knowledge resistance and its causes and consequences at the macro- as well as the micro-level. The chapters take a philosophical look at the notion of knowledge resistance, before moving on to discuss issues such as misinformation and fake news, psychological mechanisms such as motivated reasoning in processes of selective exposure and attention, how people respond to evidence and fact-checking, the role of political partisanship, political polarization over factual beliefs, and how knowledge resistance might be counteracted. This book will have a broad appeal to scholars and students interested in knowledge resistance, primarily within philosophy, psychology, media and communication, and political science, as well as journalists and policymakers. 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.
Download or read book Through an Ethnic Prism written by Stephen M. Thomas (✝) and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book meticulously recreates the most important episodes in Czech-German relations in what is now the Czech Republic. Drawing on extensive archival research, Stephen M. Thomas depicts the formation of the Czechoslovak Republic from the ruined Austro-Hungarian empire and examines political and public life between world wars via the ethnic rivalry between Germans and Czechs. He questions the nature, legitimacy and political viability of the nation state, and especially its relationship to ethnic minorities, such as the Slovaks. Confrontational nationalism and the use of ethnicity as a political tool are no less common today than they were in the 20th century. This book’s radical contribution to studies of nationalism and ethnicity is that it juxtaposes German and Czech perspectives of power and oppression as part of the same story. This framework allows us to appreciate new complexities regarding the creation of Czechoslovakia and ponder them in 21st century terms.
Download or read book Transitional Justice in Comparative Perspective written by Samar El-Masri and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if we could change the conditions in post-conflict/post-authoritarian countries to make transitional justice work better? This book argues that if the context in countries in need of transitional justice can be ameliorated before processes of transitional justice are established, they are more likely to meet with success. As the contributors reveal, this can be done in different ways. At the attitudinal level, changing the broader social ethos can improve the chances that societies will be more receptive to transitional justice. At the institutional level, the capacity of mechanisms and institutions can be strengthened to offer more support to transitional justice processes. Drawing on lessons learned in Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Gambia, Lebanon, Palestine, and Uganda, the book explores ways to better the conditions in post-conflict/post-authoritarian countries to improve the success of transitional justice.
Download or read book AIDS and Governance written by Alan Whiteside and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The political impact of HIV/AIDS varies greatly and is difficult to map. States depend on how governments choose to manage the political implications of HIV and AIDS, both those stemming from the erosions of its own capacity as well as those that originate from their changing relationship on a national and international level. Across the developing world, HIV/AIDS is slowly killing adults in their most productive years, hollowing out state structures, deepening poverty and raising profound questions that touch on the organization of all aspects of social, economic and political life. With the epidemic showing scant signs of slowing down, this innovative volume assesses how HIV/AIDS affects governance and, conversely, how governance affects the course of the epidemic. In particular, the volume:
Download or read book How Democracy Ends written by David Runciman and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How will democracy end' And what will replace it' A preeminent political scientist examines the past, present, and future of an endangered political philosophy Since the end of World War II, democracy's sweep across the globe seemed inexorable. Yet today, it seems radically imperiled, even in some of the world's most stable democracies. How bad could things get' In How Democracy Ends, David Runciman argues that we are trapped in outdated twentieth-century ideas of democratic failure. By fixating on coups and violence, we are focusing on the wrong threats. Our societies are too affluent, too elderly, and too networked to fall apart as they did in the past. We need new ways of thinking the unthinkable'a twenty-first-century vision of the end of democracy, and whether its collapse might allow us to move forward to something better. A provocative book by a major political philosopher, How Democracy Ends asks the most trenchant questions that underlie the disturbing patterns of our contemporary political life.
Download or read book Democratic Governance and Social Inequality written by Joseph S. Tulchin and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 2002 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors examine challenges that social inequities present to democratic governments, arguing that issues of poverty and inequality are becoming more important in the global environment. They consider the effects of globalization on the distribution of income and wealth within state borders, the impact of inequality on the stability and quality of democratic governance, and the future of vulnerable democracies in light of the decline in the ability of governments to reduce inequality. Tulchin is director of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Why Democracy Failed written by Allan Milne Lees and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we enter the final phase of our long accidental experiment with representative democracy it is worth understanding why its failure was a consequence of fundamental systemic flaws, so that we can attempt to avoid such obvious pitfalls when at some time in the future the survivors of all the populist-nationalist horrors to come will be looking around for better approaches to self-governance. We live in a global inter-connected world and we are a primate group species with hardwired cognitive biases. These two basic realities clash, and today we are seeing the beginnings of our descent back into discord and strife in consequence of our failure to understand and accept our hardwired limitations. The only way our descendants can hope to escape a similar fate is by building systems of governance that account for the fact we are for the most part irrational, ignorant, and biased. This book looks at why representative democracy began, why it failed, and why we now have the freedom to consider alternative options that may serve us much better. The book then goes on to outline some potential future directions.
