Download or read book Organizing Democracy written by Henk te Velde and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-20 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the new types of political organization that emerged in Western Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, from popular meetings to single-issue organizations and political parties. The development of these has often been used to demonstrate a movement towards democratic representation or political institutionalization. This volume challenges the idea that the development of ‘democracy’ is a story of rise and progress at all. It is rather a story of continuous but never completely satisfying attempts of interpreting the rule of the people. Taking the perspective of nineteenth-century organizers as its point of departure, this study shows that contemporaries hardly distinguished between petitioning, meeting and association. The attraction of organizing was that it promised representation, accountability and popular participation. Only in the twentieth century did parties reliable partners for the state in averting revolution, managing the unpredictable effects of universal suffrage, and reforming society. This collection analyzes them in their earliest stage, as just one of several types of civil society organizations, that did not differ that much from each other. The promise of organization, and the experiments that resulted from it, deeply impacted modern politics.
Download or read book Organizing for Democracy written by G. Sidney Silliman and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1998-05-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The number, variety, and political prominence of non-governmental organization in the Philippines present a unique opportunity to study citizen activism. Nearly 60,000 in number by some estimates, grassroots and support organizations promote the interests of farmers, the urban poor, women, and indigenous peoples. They provide an avenue for political participation and a mechanism, unequaled elsewhere in Southeast Asia, for redressing the inequities of society. Organizing for Democracy brings together the most recent research on these organizations and their programs in the first book addressing the political significance of NGOs in the Philippines.
Download or read book Organizing Democracy written by Paul Poast and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past twenty-five years, a number of countries have made the transition to democracy. The support of international organizations is essential to success on this difficult path. Yet, despite extensive research into the relationship between democratic transitions and membership in international organizations, the mechanisms underlying the relationship remain unclear. With Organizing Democracy, Paul Poast and Johannes Urpelainen argue that leaders of transitional democracies often have to draw on the support of international organizations to provide the public goods and expertise needed to consolidate democratic rule. Looking at the Baltic states’ accession to NATO, Poast and Urpelainen provide a compelling and statistically rigorous account of the sorts of support transitional democracies draw from international institutions. They also show that, in many cases, the leaders of new democracies must actually create new international organizations to better serve their needs, since they may not qualify for help from existing ones.
Download or read book Organizing Against Democracy written by Antonis A. Ellinas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organizing Against Democracy investigates some of the most important challenges modern democracies face, filling a distinctive gap in the literature, both empirically and theoretically. Ellinas examines the attempts of three of the most extreme European far-right parties to establish roots in local societies, and the responses of democratic actors. He offers a theory of local party development to analyze the many factors affecting the evolution of far-right parties at the subnational level. Using extraordinarily rich data, the author examines the 'lives' of local far-right party organizations in Greece, Germany and Slovakia, studying thousands of party activities and interviewing dozens of party leaders and functionaries, and antifascists. He goes on to explore how and why extreme parties succeed in some local settings while, in others, they fail. This book broadens our understanding of right-wing extremism, illuminating the factors limiting its corrosiveness.
Download or read book Blessed Are the Organized written by Jeffrey Stout and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-12-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How ordinary citizens band together to bring about real change In an America where the rich and fortunate have free rein to do as they please, can the ideal of liberty and justice for all be anything but an empty slogan? Many Americans are doubtful, and have withdrawn into apathy and cynicism. But thousands of others are not ready to give up on democracy just yet. Working outside the notice of the national media, ordinary citizens across the nation are meeting in living rooms, church basements, synagogues, and schools to identify shared concerns, select and cultivate leaders, and take action. Their goal is to hold big government and big business accountable. In this important new book, Jeffrey Stout bears witness to the successes and failures of progressive grassroots organizing, and the daunting forces now arrayed against it. Stout tells vivid stories of people fighting entrenched economic and political interests around the country. From parents and teachers striving to overcome gang violence in South Central Los Angeles, to a Latino priest north of the Rio Grande who brings his parish into a citizens' organization, to the New Orleans residents who get out the vote by taking a jazz band through streets devastated by Hurricane Katrina, Stout describes how these ordinary people conceive of citizenship, how they acquire and exercise power, and how religious ideas and institutions contribute to their successes. The most important book on organizing and grassroots democracy in a generation, Blessed Are the Organized is a passionate and hopeful account of how our endangered democratic principles can be put into action.
Download or read book Tools for Radical Democracy written by Joan Minieri and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2007-09-10 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tools for Radical Democracy is an essential resource for grassroots organizers and leaders, students of activism and advocacy, and anyone trying to increase the civic participation of ordinary people. Authors Joan Minieri and Paul Getsos share stories and tools from their nationally recognized and award-winning work of building a community-led organization, training community leaders, and conducting campaigns that changed public policy and delivered concrete results to tens of thousands of people. This how-to manual includes: · In-depth analysis of how to launch and win a campaign · Tools and guidelines for training people to lead their own campaigns and organizations · Insights for using technology effectively, building more powerful alliances, and engaging in the social justice movement
Download or read book Organizing Civil Society written by Philip D. Oxhorn and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Prisms of the People written by Hahrie Han and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-07-12 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grassroots organizing and collective action have always been fundamental to American democracy but have been burgeoning since the 2016 election, as people struggle to make their voices heard in this moment of societal upheaval. Unfortunately much of that action has not had the kind of impact participants might want, especially among movements representing the poor and marginalized who often have the most at stake when it comes to rights and equality. Yet, some instances of collective action have succeeded. What’s the difference between a movement that wins victories for its constituents, and one that fails? What are the factors that make collective action powerful? Prisms of the People addresses those questions and more. Using data from six movement organizations—including a coalition that organized a 104-day protest in Phoenix in 2010 and another that helped restore voting rights to the formerly incarcerated in Virginia—Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa show that the power of successful movements most often is rooted in their ability to act as “prisms of the people,” turning participation into political power just as prisms transform white light into rainbows. Understanding the organizational design choices that shape the people, their leaders, and their strategies can help us understand how grassroots groups achieve their goals. Linking strong scholarship to a deep understanding of the needs and outlook of activists, Prisms of the People is the perfect book for our moment—for understanding what’s happening and propelling it forward.
Download or read book Doing Democracy written by Bill Moyer and published by New Society Publishers. This book was released on 2001-08-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An empowering guide to understanding the strategies behind successful social movements.
Download or read book Democracy in Action written by Kristina Smock and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In cities across the US, grass-roots organizations are working to revitalize popular participation in disenfranchised communities by bringing ordinary people into public life. This book examines the techniques used to achieve these goals.
Download or read book Stoking the Fire of Democracy written by Stephen Noble Smith and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Smith is a voice from and for the next generation of fighters for social justice, giving his colleagues an introduction to grassroots organizing based on his own experiences in places as diverse as Harvard University, Botswana and Chicago. For four years, he was the lead organizer of PACT, a grassroots organization for young adults affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation. Stoking the Fire of Democracy explains how organizations are built and sustained, how they go into action around issues of common concern, how they exercise power, and how they learn from their successes and failures. For young people who want to know what comes next, this book will help them become what Saul Alinksy called "the fire under the boiler of democracy."
Download or read book Organizing Political Parties written by Susan E. Scarrow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-23 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political party organizations play large roles in democracies, yet their organizations differ widely, and their statutes change much more frequently than constitutions or electoral laws. How do these differences, and these frequent changes, affect the operation of democracy? This book seeks to answer these questions by presenting a comprehensive overview of the state of party organization in nineteen contemporary democracies. Using a unique new data collection, the book's chapters test propositions about the reasons for variation and similarities across party organizations. They find more evidence of within-country similarity than of cross-national patterns based on party ideology. After exploring parties' organizational differences, the remaining chapters investigate the impact of these differences. The volume considers a wide range of theories about how party organization may affect political life, including the impact of party rules on the selection of female candidates, the links between party decision processes and the stability of party programmes, the connection between party finance sources and public trust in political parties, and whether the strength of parties' extra-parliamentary organization affects the behaviour of their elected legislators. Collectively these chapters help to advance comparative studies of elections and representation by inserting party institutions and party agency more firmly into the centre of such studies. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Emilie van Haute, Professor of Political Science, Université libre de Bruxelles; Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University; and Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston.
Download or read book How Organizations Develop Activists written by Hahrie Han and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are some civic associations better than others at getting-and keeping-people involved in activism? Using in-person observations, surveys, and field experiments, this book compares and describes contemporary models for engaging activists to show the effectiveness of one that combine political activism with transformative personal and collective growth.
Download or read book No Shortcuts written by Jane McAlevey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An examination of strategies for effective organizing"--
Download or read book Upending American Politics written by Theda Skocpol and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was startling, as was the victory of Donald Trump eight years later. Because both presidents were unusual and gained office backed by Congresses controlled by their own parties, their elections kick-started massive counter-movements. The Tea Party starting in 2009 and the "resistance" after November 2016 transformed America's political landscape. Upending American Politics offers a fresh perspective on recent upheavals, tracking the emergence and spread of local voluntary citizens' groups, the ongoing activities of elite advocacy organizations and consortia of wealthy donors, and the impact of popular and elite efforts on the two major political parties and candidate-led political campaigns. Going well beyond national surveys, Theda Skocpol, Caroline Tervo, and their contributors use organizational documents, interviews, and local visits to probe changing organizational configurations at the national level and in swing states. This volume analyzes conservative politics in the first section and progressive responses in the second to provide a clear overview of US politics as a whole. By highlighting evidence from the state level, it also reveals the important interplay of local and national trends.
Download or read book Organizing Democracy written by Göran Sundström and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governance has emerged a central concept in the fields of both political theory and public administration. But it has not done so without controversy and this book examines one of the primary concerns associated with the theory and practice of government namely, its relationship to democratic values and their practical realization. Moreover, it does this through a neglected perspective. Whereas most research on governance has taken a top down approach, these essays look at specific empirical experiences from the bottom up. The book thus offers a new and useful discussion on an essential question in contemporary debates about governance. Frank Fischer, Rutgers University, US Nationally and supra-nationally, political decision-making shifts from democratic fora to decentralized organizations of what is called governance . Questions arise about the survival of democratic values in unaccountable structures that assign agency to special interests and to professional and non-governmental expertise. Organizing Democracy provides detailed case studies of these new forms, and assesses how they carry or deflect democratic values. It will be of great interest to students of new organizational forms, and those concerned with the maintenance of democracy. John W. Meyer, Stanford University, US The proliferation of interactive forms of governance may challenge and problemematize the predominant model of liberal representative democracy. Nevertheless, the new governance arrangements may also contribute to a reinvigoration of democracy in the face of the growing democratic disenchantment. Instead of continuing the endless theoretical debates on this issue, this book presents a number of empirical studies of how democracy is articulated and re-articulated by a plethora of actors in the new interactive governance arenas. As such, the book provides a most welcome analysis of the embryonic reinvention of democracy in our increasingly complex, fragmented and multi-layered societies. Jacob Torfing, Roskilde University, Denmark This fresh and fascinating book adds an organizational perspective to the analysis of governance and democracy. It argues that a number of organizational factors challenge the notion of agency assumed by a governance model. The expert contributors criticize the governance model for resting on the rational myth and the assumption that democratic ideals can be translated to specified democratic values, which in turn can be adhered to by democratic agents. By adding an organizational perspective to the analysis of governance and democracy, the book proves that theories about organizing and the construction of agency can be used to explain how and why democratic values are attended to in governance structures. Organizing Democracy will prove essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students in public management, organizational studies, political science and sociology. Practitioners with an interest in public management policy will also find this book invaluable.
Download or read book Organizing for Power and Empowerment written by Jacqueline B. Mondros and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through entirely new interviews, Organizing for Power and Empowerment: The Fight for Democracy features the voices and experiences of more than forty organizers, telling the stories of twenty geographically and racially diverse progressive organizations. The authors highlight how organizations use innovative new strategies, like targeting corporate expansion, operating at statewide levels, building new structures for electoral action, and establishing community-labor coalitions to win on such critical issues as worker protections, bail reform, immigration, climate change, and affordable housing. The book describes organizations working across a range of issues. The organizers discuss campaigns that activate people around issues that matter in their daily lives—work schedules, bail reform, schools, voting, and affordable housing—and connect them to broader topics such as racial justice, immigration, climate change, criminal justice, and workers’ rights. They share their thoughts on building community organizations and empowering ordinary citizens to become leaders. The book underscores the leadership of Black Americans, other people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people as they lead campaigns to address the disparate effects of inequality faced by their communities. It provides detailed analysis of the new and effective organizational structures and change strategies, and sheds important new light on foundational organizing practices, innovations, and the challenges and opportunities for progressive social action today.
