Download or read book Policy Representation in Western Democracies written by Warren Edward Miller and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comparative analysis of policy representation in five Western Democracies: France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the US. A leading group of authors examines the impact of belief systems and geographical and institutional characteristics on the match between the policy preferences of the electorate and those of their representatives.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies written by Robert Rohrschneider and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 731 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies offers a state-of-the-art assessment of the functioning of political representation in liberal democracies. In 34 chapters the world's leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation address eight broad themes: The concept and theories of political representation, its history and the main requisites for its development; elite orientations and behavior; descriptive representation; party government and representation; non-electoral forms of political participation and how they relate to political representation; the challenges to representative democracy originating from the growing importance of non-majoritarian institutions and social media; the rise of populism and its consequences for the functioning of representative democracy; the challenge caused by economic and political globlization: what does it mean for the functioning of political representation at the national leval and is it possible to develop institutions of representative democracy at a level above the state that meet the normative criteria of representative democracy and are supported by the people? The various chapters offer a comprehensive review of the literature on the various aspects of political representation. The main organizing principle of the Handbook is the chain of political representation, the chain connecting the interests and policy preferences of the people to public policy via political parties, parliament, and government. Most of the chapters assessing the functioning of the chain of political representation and its various links are based on original comparative political research. Comparative research on political representation and its various subfields has developed dramatically over the last decades so that even ten years ago a Handbook like this would have looked totally different.
Download or read book Political Parties in Western Democracies written by Leon D. Epstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a brilliant, persuasive case that American political parties, so often dismissed as immature or ineffective compared with their European counterparts, are in fact old and durable political organizations, serving well the needs of a pluralistic society. What chiefly distinguishes this work is the inclusion of considerable material on American parties in a comparative context to the analysis of British, Scandinavian, European, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand political parties.
Download or read book Linking Citizens and Parties written by Lawrence Ezrow and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-05-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linking Citizens and Parties addresses familiar questions about political representation: Are parties responsive to their core supporters or to the public in general? Do parties that adopt centrist policy positions benefit in elections? Does proportional representation encourage party extremism? These fundamental questions about democracy are paired with the empirical observation of Western European democracies during the last thirty years. The study highlights the pathways (mainstream and niche) through which citizens' political preferences are expressed by their political parties. It concludes with a positive evaluation of these democracies as their citizens have access to at least one, and possibly both niche and mainstream pathways.
Download or read book Economics and Elections written by Michael S. Lewis-Beck and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cross-national study of the effect of economic conditions on voting behavior in the United States and the Western democracies
Download or read book Do Elections Still Matter written by Emiliano Grossman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are election campaigns relevant to policymaking, as they should in a democracy? This book sheds new light on this central democratic concern based on an ambitious study of democratic mandates through the lens of agenda-setting in five West European countries since the 1980s. The authors develop and test a new model bridging studies of party competition, pledge fulfillment, and policymaking. The core argument is that electoral priorities are a major factor shaping policy agendas, but mandates should not be mistaken as partisan. Parties are like 'snakes in tunnels': they have distinctive priorities, but they need to respond to emerging problems and their competitors' priorities, resulting in considerable cross-partisan overlap. The 'tunnel of attention' remains constraining in the policymaking arena, especially when opposition parties have resources to press governing parties to act on the campaign priorities. This key aspect of mandate responsiveness has been neglected so far, because in traditional models of mandate representation, party platforms are conceived as a set of distinctive priorities, whose agenda-setting impact ultimately depends on the institutional capacity of the parties in office. Rather differently, this book suggests that counter-majoritarian institutions and windows for opposition parties generate key incentives to stick to the mandate. It shows that these findings hold across five very different democracies: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. The results contribute to a renewal of mandate theories of representation and lead to question the idea underlying much of the comparative politics literature that majoritarian systems are more responsive than consensual ones.
Download or read book Representation and Community in Western Democracies written by Nirmala Rao and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-05-19 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book of critical essays explores new thinking and new evidence on the role of locally-elected representatives in Western democracies. The book is topical in the light of the intense political and popular interest in the problems of making local government representative and responsive. The contributors, drawn from the UK, the US, France, Denmark, and Norway, deal with two principal themes: political recruitment and representativeness and the processes of political representation.
Download or read book The Chain of Representation written by Brian F. Crisp and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative analysis of why democratic institutions often produce dissonance between citizens' preferences and public policy in separation-of-powers regimes.
Download or read book Achieving Democracy Through Interest Representation written by Patrycja Rozbicka and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-24 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assesses the quality of democracy through the study of organized interests in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) since the collapse of communism in 1989 up to 2017. It offers a much-needed comprehensive look into formal interest representation in CEE countries and compares this with the model in Western democracies. Drawing on democratic theory and comparative analysis, the authors explore the effects of a legal framework, political as well as social contexts. The volume contributes to debates on the performance of young democracies in CEE, where scholars argue that there is a ‘democratic crisis’ and democratic fatigue while the interest group system is often labelled as weak and, in some cases, underdeveloped. Although great efforts have been made to deepen our understanding of interest organization and lobbying tools, the current literature fails to provide a comprehensive answer on the influence of unsupportive environments on population ecology. The case of CEE countries shows significant effects of political and social contexts on interest representation, stimulating a debate about the quality of democratic institutions following the collapse of communism.
Download or read book Ruling The Void written by Peter Mair and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the long-established democracies of Western Europe, electoral turnouts are in decline, membership is shrinking in the major parties, and those who remain loyal partisans are sapped of enthusiasm. Peter Mair’s new book weighs the impact of these changes, which together show that, after a century of democratic aspiration, electorates are deserting the political arena. Mair examines the alarming parallel development that has seen Europe’s political elites remodel themselves as a homogeneous professional class, withdrawing into state institutions that offer relative stability in a world of fickle voters. Meanwhile, non-democratic agencies and practices proliferate and gain credibility—not least among them the European Union itself, an organization contributing to the depoliticization of the member states and one whose notorious ‘democratic deficit’ reflects the deliberate intentions of its founders. Ruling the Void offers an authoritative and chilling assessment of the prospects for popular political representation today, not only in the varied democracies of Europe but throughout the developed world.
Download or read book Women Men and Elections written by Rosalind Shorrocks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women, Men, and Elections sheds new light on gendered political behaviour by analysing the relationship between policy supply and gender gaps in vote choice across elections in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and multiple Western European countries. Rosalind Shorrocks argues that the electoral context, and specifically policy supply, are associated with the ways in which vote choice at election time is gendered. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the Comparative Manifesto Project, Shorrocks finds that the extent to which men and women differ in their vote choice is contingent on the policy choices that parties off er to voters. Women and men respond to party policy positions in ways that are linked to both their gender and their socioeconomic position, producing variation in gendered political behaviour across elections, across countries, and across subgroups in society. Women, Men, and Elections offers a much- needed fresh perspective on our understanding of political behaviour, representation, and party competition. It serves as an excellent supplementary text for students and scholars of comparative politics, gender and politics, and political behaviour.
Download or read book The Strain of Representation written by Robert Rohrschneider and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Strain of Representation examines the quality of democratic representation in Europe, focusing on the way that political parties channel the preferences of different groups of citizens into government policies.
Download or read book The Other Western Europe written by Earl H. Fry and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Principles of Representative Government written by Bernard Manin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-02-28 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis of this original and provocative book is that representative government should be understood as a combination of democratic and undemocratic, aristocratic elements. Professor Manin challenges the conventional view that representative democracy is no more than an indirect form of government by the people, in which citizens elect representatives only because they cannot assemble and govern in person. The argument is developed by examining the historical moments when the present institutional arrangements were chosen from among the then available alternatives. Professor Manin reminds us that while today representative institutions and democracy appear as virtually indistinguishable, when representative government was first established in Europe and America, it was designed in opposition to democracy proper. Drawing on the procedures used in earlier republican systems, from classical Athens to Renaissance Florence, in order to highlight the alternatives that were forsaken, Manin brings to the fore the generally overlooked results of representative mechanisms. These include the elitist aspect of elections and the non-binding character of campaign promises.
Download or read book Diploma Democracy written by M. A. P. Bovens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lay politics lies at the heart of democracy. Political offices are the only offices for which no formal qualifications are required. Contemporary political practices are diametrically opposed to this constitutional ideal. Most democracies in Western Europe are diploma democracies - ruled by those with the highest formal qualifications. Citizens with low or medium educational qualifications currently make up about 70 percent of the electorates, yet they have become virtually absent from almost all political arenas. University graduates have come to dominate all political institutions and venues, from political parties, parliaments and cabinets, to organised interests, deliberative settings, and Internet consultations. This rise of a political meritocracy is part of larger trend. In the information society, educational background, like class or religion, is an important source of social and political divides. Those who are well educated tend to be cosmopolitans, whereas the lesser educated citizens are more likely to be nationalists. This book documents the context, contours, and consequences of this rise of a political meritocracy. It explores the domination of higher educated citizens in political participation, civil society, and political office in Western Europe. It discusses the consequences of this rise of a political meritocracy, such as descriptive deficits, policy incongruences, biased standards, and cynicism and distrust. Also, it looks at ways to remedy, or at least mitigate, some of the negative effects of diploma democracy.
Download or read book The Political Power of Economic Elites in Contemporary Western Democracies written by Alberto Parmigiani and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper employs a multidisciplinary social sciences approach to analyse the political power of contemporary economic elites in the political sphere of Western democratic countries. Economic elites are defined as the wealthiest members of society characterized by their disproportionate access to or control over economic resources, and their ability to convert them, directly or indirectly, into power or influence. This paper makes use of the classical concepts of structural and instrumental power to explain the sources of their influence in democratic decision-making processes. I claim that a powerful and distinctive trait of elites lies in their high internal cohesion in the steadfast defense of their interests. Connecting different streams of literature, I contrast elites' awareness of their power in the political struggle around inequality and redistribution, interpreted as an element of cohesion, with misperceptions about inequality on the part of average citizens, a common finding in recent research on this issue. Hence, I propose this cognitive divide between average citizens and economic elites as an innovative angle to look at the classical puzzle of high inequality combined with low demand for redistribution. The paper then reviews the political science literature on the ability of the wealthy to obtain their political objectives and influence the democratic legislative process. The income and wealth bias in political representation has been empirically demonstrated in the United States and, preliminarily, in some European countries. The findings show that the preferences of average citizens have little or no effect on the policy changes enacted in many Western mature democracies. The paper carefully surveys the possible explanations proposed for this relevant finding. Finally, I argue that economic elites constitute a cultural hegemony by creating and reinforcing institutions and beliefs that shape or maintain the extremely unequal distribution of political and economic resources. Effectively, the richest part of society has been able to impose its ideas through a long-term agenda-setting approach that entails the formation of networks of cultural organizations to sustain the legitimacy of inequality. Today's highly unequal status quo has been facilitated by this process, together with a series of feedback effects from political decisions that have simultaneously further increased inequality and corroborated public opinion about its inevitability. Policies that have increased inequality from the 1970s onwards have shaped the perception of inequality, creating social acceptability around the idea of individual freedom and delegitimizing government welfare expenditure. This change in public attitudes has enabled the policy space for even greater inequality, in a cyclical mechanism that is very hard to break.
Download or read book Elections as Instruments of Democracy written by G. Bingham Powell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores elections as instruments of democracy. Focusing on elections in 20 democracies over the last 25 years, it examines the differences between two visions of democracy - the majoritarian vision and the proportional influence vision.
