Download or read book Democracy from Scratch written by M. Steven Fish and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-07-22 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a fresh view of Russian political change in the Gorbachev and early post-Soviet periods not by examining perestroika and glasnost in and of themselves, but by investigating the autonomous political organizations that responded to liberalization. Extensive study of these political groups, in Moscow and several provincial cities, has led M. Steven Fish to conclude that they were shaped to a far greater degree by the nature of the Soviet state than by socioeconomic modernization, political culture, native psychology, or Russian historical tradition. Fish's statist theory of societal change in Russia yields a powerful explanation of why Russia's new political society differs radically not only from the "totalized," sub-jugated country of the pre-1985 period but also from the "civil societies" found in the West and in many developing countries. In addition, the author shows how the legacy of the Soviet experience continues to influence the development--arguably the underdevelopment--of representative political institutions in post-Soviet Russia, making the establishment of stable democracy unlikely in the near term. This book proposes a novel and theoretically sophisticated way to study Russian politics. It offers a rigorous approach to understanding social movements, political party formation, regime change, and democratization in general. While focusing primarily on a single country, it is vigorously comparative at the same time.

Download or read book Between Dictatorship and Democracy written by Michael McFaul and published by Carnegie Endowment. This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For hundreds of years, dictators have ruled Russia. Do they still? In the late 1980s, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev launched a series of political reforms that eventually allowed for competitive elections, the emergence of an independent press, the formation of political parties, and the sprouting of civil society. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, these proto-democratic institutions endured in an independent Russia. But did the processes unleashed by Gorbachev and continued under Russian President Boris Yeltsin lead eventually to liberal democracy in Russia? If not, what kind of political regime did take hold in post-Soviet Russia? And how has Vladimir Putin's rise to power influenced the course of democratic consolidation or the lack thereof? Between Dictatorship and Democracy seeks to give a comprehensive answer to these fundamental questions about the nature of Russian politics.

Download or read book Real Democracy written by Frank M. Bryan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relying on an astounding collection of more than three decades of firsthand research, Frank M. Bryan examines one of the purest forms of American democracy, the New England town meeting. At these meetings, usually held once a year, all eligible citizens of the town may become legislators; they meet in face-to-face assemblies, debate the issues on the agenda, and vote on them. And although these meetings are natural laboratories for democracy, very few scholars have systematically investigated them. A nationally recognized expert on this topic, Bryan has now done just that. Studying 1,500 town meetings in his home state of Vermont, he and his students recorded a staggering amount of data about them—238,603 acts of participation by 63,140 citizens in 210 different towns. Drawing on this evidence as well as on evocative "witness" accounts—from casual observers to no lesser a light than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Bryan paints a vivid picture of how real democracy works. Among the many fascinating questions he explores: why attendance varies sharply with town size, how citizens resolve conflicts in open forums, and how men and women behave differently in town meetings. In the end, Bryan interprets this brand of local government to find evidence for its considerable staying power as the most authentic and meaningful form of direct democracy. Giving us a rare glimpse into how democracy works in the real world, Bryan presents here an unorthodox and definitive book on this most cherished of American institutions.

Download or read book Design Justice written by Sasha Costanza-Chock and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival. What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.

Download or read book Democratizing Innovation written by Eric Von Hippel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006-02-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The process of user-centered innovation: how it can benefit both users and manufacturers and how its emergence will bring changes in business models and in public policy. Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products—most notably in the free and open-source software movement—but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive. Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses—the custom semiconductor industry is one example—that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.

Download or read book State and Society in 21st Century China written by Peter Hays Gries and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a team of leading China scholars, this book explores the dynamics of state power and legitimation in twenty-first century China, and the implications of changing state-society relations for the future viability of the People's Republic. Key subjects covered include: the legitimacy of the Communist Party state-society relations ethnic and religious resistance rural and urban contention nationalism popular and youth culture prospects for democracy.

Download or read book Authoritarian Russia written by Vladimir Gel'man and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia today represents one of the major examples of the phenomenon of "electoral authoritarianism" which is characterized by adopting the trappings of democratic institutions (such as elections, political parties, and a legislature) and enlisting the service of the country's essentially authoritarian rulers. Why and how has the electoral authoritarian regime been consolidated in Russia? What are the mechanisms of its maintenance, and what is its likely future course? This book attempts to answer these basic questions. Vladimir Gel'man examines regime change in Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present day, systematically presenting theoretical and comparative perspectives of the factors that affected regime changes and the authoritarian drift of the country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's national political elites aimed to achieve their goals by creating and enforcing of favorable "rules of the game" for themselves and maintaining informal winning coalitions of cliques around individual rulers. In the 1990s, these moves were only partially successful given the weakness of the Russian state and troubled post-socialist economy. In the 2000s, however, Vladimir Putin rescued the system thanks to the combination of economic growth and the revival of the state capacity he was able to implement by imposing a series of non-democratic reforms. In the 2010s, changing conditions in the country have presented new risks and challenges for the Putin regime that will play themselves out in the years to come.

Download or read book Presidential Power in Russia written by Eugene Huskey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first major assessment of the role of the presidency in Russia's difficult transition form communist rule. Huskey analyzes the establishment and functioning of the Russian presidency as an institution and in relation to the other leading institutions of state: the government, parliament, courts, and regional authorities. Although this is not a biography of the first president, Boris Yeltsin, his allies and his rivals loom large in the study of a critical phase in the creation of a new Russian political system.

Download or read book little scratch written by Rebecca Watson and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Extraordinary"--THE NEW YORKER In the formally innovative tradition of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Ducks, Newburyport comes a dazzlingly original, shot-in-the-arm of a debut that reveals a young woman's every thought over the course of one deceptively ordinary day. She wakes up, goes to work. Watches the clock and checks her phone. But underneath this monotony there's something else going on: something under her skin. Relayed in interweaving columns that chart the feedback loop of memory, the senses, and modern distractions with wit and precision, our narrator becomes increasingly anxious as the day moves on: Is she overusing the heart emoji? Isn't drinking eight glasses of water a day supposed to fix everything? Why is the etiquette of the women's bathroom so fraught? How does she define rape? And why can't she stop scratching? Fiercely moving and slyly profound, little scratch is a defiantly playful look at how our minds function in--and survive--the darkest moments.

Download or read book Unparalleled Reforms written by Christopher Marsh and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reforms of the Soviet and Chinese communist regimes were unparalleled-both in the radical, precedent-setting reforms attempted by the two countries and in the outcomes of these attempts. While the Soviet Union collapsed quickly in the midst of its reforms, more than a decade later China, the world's most populous country, still stands as a testament to the resilience of Communist rule. It is this phenomenon that Christopher Marsh explores in Unparalleled Reforms. Marsh goes beyond simply discussing the differing initial conditions, the sequencing of reform, and cultural differences to also consider the objectives and intentions of the policy makers and leaders that directed the reform processes and the interdependent nature of politics on the world stage. Unparalleled Reforms offers the reader a sophisticated understanding of the nature of political reform and develops a theoretical model that can account for commonly overlooked factors that affect political processes in all types of political systems. In a class all its own, this is an important work for scholars interested in comparative politics, international relations, economics, Asian studies, and Russian studies.

Download or read book Gods in the Time of Democracy written by Kajri Jain and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-08 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”

Download or read book State Building and International Intervention in Bosnia written by Roberto Belloni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-01-07 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The presence of international missions in weak and failing states across the globe confirms that multi-lateral involvement has become a strategic imperative to secure international peace and security. With demands for democratic governance and peaceful coexistence in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, the questions and issues addressed in Bosnia take on greater urgency. Focussing on Bosnia after the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) in 1995, this book examines the role of the international community in state building and intervention. It makes two arguments that challenge conventional, power-sharing approaches to conflict management based on group representation and elite collusion. First, the author explores the idea that effective intervention requires moving beyond the dichotomy between international imposition of state-building measures and local self-government. When compromise among the former warring parties proves impossible and domestic institutions cannot autonomously guarantee efficient policy-making, the presence of international staff in domestic institutions can guarantee further democratisation and local ownership of the peace process. Second, this book argues that the long-term transformation of conflict requires the active involvement and empowerment of domestic civil society groups. Instead of considering domestic society as a desolate blank slate, international intervention needs to build on local resources and assets, which are available even in the aftermath of a devastating war. Based on extensive field research this book will be of interest to students, scholars and policy makers struggling to understand and improve upon the dynamics of international intervention, and to those with a specific interest in the Balkans.

Download or read book Authoritative Democracies written by Bill K. Koul and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-07-22 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book comments on growing authoritarianism in democracy and suggests how it ought to be instead. It asks if some degree of authoritarianism is the need of the hour to address potentially existential issues facing the human race. Readers are encouraged to analyse the state of democracy in their own countries and verify if it meets their expectations, or if it is just a myth or an imposter, or a necessary but imperfect compulsion in the absence of a perfect alternative. The book presents a commentary on the state of democracy in some of the world’s leading democracies. It aims to challenge the human mind, which seems to be getting accustomed to not having to think, thanks to a constant bombardment of information—real and fake and in-between—that it receives through social and print media, which is freely accessible through smartphone to which it has become addicted. It discusses how the drivers of capitalism – through their business-like connections with powerful and influential politicians and celebrities—could be cleverly manipulating the gullible human mind and exploiting the system to their own material benefit.

Download or read book Ideology and National Identity in Post communist Foreign Policy written by Rick Fawn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative analysis of the foreign policies of eight post-communist states which considers the extent to which official communist ideology has been replaced by nationalism and establishes how these states express their national identities through foreign policy.

Download or read book Perestroika and the Party written by Francesco Di Palma and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countless studies have assessed the dramatic reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, but their analysis of the impact on European communism has focused overwhelmingly on the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc nations. This ambitious collection takes a much broader view, reconstructing and evaluating the historical trajectories of glasnost and perestroika on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Moving beyond domestic politics and foreign relations narrowly defined, the research gathered here constitutes a transnational survey of these reforms’ collective impact, showing how they were variably received and implemented, and how they shaped the prospects for “proletarian internationalism” in diverse political contexts.

Download or read book Democracy and Its Alternatives written by Richard Rose and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1998-10-16 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of Communism has created the opportunity for democracy to spread from Prague to the Baltic and Black Seas. But the alternatives—dictatorship or totalitarian rule—are more in keeping with the traditions of Central Europe. And for many post-Communist societies, democracy has come to be associated with inflation, unemployment, crime, and corruption. Is it still true, then, as Winston Churchill suggested a half-century ago, that people will accept democracy with all its faults—because it is better than anything else? To find out, political scientists Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Christian Haerpfer examine evidence from post-Communist societies in eastern Europe. Drawing on data from public opinion and exit polls, election results, and interviews, the authors present testable hypotheses regarding regime change, consolidation, and prospects for stabilization. The authors point out that the abrupt transition to democracy in post-Communist countries is normal; gradual evolution in the Anglo-American way is the exception to the rule. While most recent books on democratization focus on Latin America and, to some extent, Asia, the present volume offers a unique look at the process currently under way in nine eastern European countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Despite the many problems these post-Communist societies are experiencing in making the transition to a more open and democratic polity, the authors conclude that a little democracy is better than no democracy at all.

Download or read book Civil Society Before Democracy written by Nancy Bermeo and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2000-11-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together historians and political scientists, this unique collaboration compares nineteenth-century civil societies that failed to develop lasting democracies with civil societies that succeeded. Much of the current literature on the connection between civil society and consolidating democracy focuses exclusively on single, contemporary polities that are ever-changing and uncertain. By studying historical cases, the authors are able to demonstrate which civil societies developed in tandem with lasting democracies and which did not. Contrasting these two sets of cases, the book both enlightens readers about individual countries and extracts lessons about the connections between civil society and democracy in contemporary times. Above all, the authors ask the vital but under-researched question, OHow and why does democratic civil society develop?O