Download or read book Real Politics written by Jean Bethke Elshtain and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2000-03-10 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America's foremost public intellectuals, Jean Bethke Elshtain has been on the frontlines in the most hotly contested and deeply divisive issues of our time. Now in Real Politics, Elshtain gives further proof of her willingness to speak her mind, courting disagreement and even censure from those who prefer their ideologies neat. At the center of Elshtain's work is a passionate concern with the relationship between political rhetoric and political action. For Elshtain, politics is a sphere of concrete responsibility. Political speech should, therefore, approach the richness of actual lives and commitments rather than present impossible utopias. In her essays, Elshtain finds in the writings of V clav Havel, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Camus a language appropriate to the complexity of everyday life and politics, and she critiques philosophers and writers who distance us from a concrete, embodied world. She argues against those repressive strains within contemporary feminism which insist that families and even sexual differentiation are inherently oppressive. Along the way, she challenges an ideology of victimization that too often loses sight of individual victims in its pursuit of abstract goals. Elshtain reaffirms the quirky and by no means simple pleasures of small-town life as a microcosm of the human condition and considers the current crisis in American education and its consequences for democracy. Beyond exploring the details of political life over the past two decades, Real Politics advocates a via media politics that avoids unacceptable extremes and serves as a model for responsible political discourse. Throughout her diverse and insightful writings, Elshtain champions a civic philosophy that tends to the dignity of everyday life as a democratic imperative of the first order. "Jean Bethke Elshtain is a person of rare intellect. The moral wisdom that pervades these essays reminds us that when all is said and done politics is about the life and death of real people who are anything but abstractions. Her erudition is remarkable, but equally stunning is her eye for the significant. What she is so good at is helping us see the moral and political significance of the everyday." -- Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University " Real Politics serves as a forceful reminder that Jean Elshtain has been dealing with the real world in twenty-five years of powerful essaying. Transcending ideological categories, she writes out of hope that human beings can enjoy those capacities of reason and faith which make them human. It is a pleasure to be reintroduced to her sustained intelligence." -- Alan Wolfe, Boston University

Download or read book Seeking the Center written by Martin A. Levin and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2001-08-03 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past decade, Democrats and Republicans each have received about fifty percent of the votes and controlled about half of the government, but this has not resulted in policy deadlock. Despite highly partisan political posturing, the policy regime has been largely moderate. Incremental, yet substantial, policy innovations such as welfare reform; deficit reduction; the North American Free Trade Agreement; and the deregulation of telecommunications, banking, and agriculture have been accompanied by such continuities as Social Security and Medicare, the maintenance of earlier immigration reforms, and the persistence of many rights-based policies, including federal affirmative action. In Seeking the Center, twenty-one contributors analyze policy outcomes in light of the frequent alternation in power among evenly divided parties. They show how the triumph of policy moderation and the defeat of more ambitious efforts, such as health care reform, can be explained by mutually supporting economic, intellectual, and political forces. Demonstrating that the determinants of public policy become clear by probing specific issues, rather than in abstract theorizing, they restore the politics of policymaking to the forefront of the political science agenda. A successor to Martin A. Levin and Marc K. Landy’s influential The New Politics of Public Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), this book will be vital reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in political science and public policy, as well as a resource for scholars in both fields.

Download or read book Mediocracy written by Alain Deneault and published by Between the Lines. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There was no Reichstag fire. No storming of the Bastille. No mutiny on the Aurora. Instead, the mediocre have seized power without firing a single shot. They rose to power on the tide of an economy where workers produce assembly-line meals without knowing how to cook at home, give customers instructions over the phone that they themselves don’t understand, or sell books and newspapers that they never read. Canadian intellectual juggernaut Alain Deneault has taken on all kinds of evildoers: mining companies, tax-dodgers, and corporate criminals. Now he takes on the most menacing threat of all: the mediocre.

Download or read book Governing from the Centre written by Donald J. Savoie and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agencies and policies instituted to streamline Ottawa's planning process instead concentrate power in the hands of the Prime Minister, more powerful in Canadian politics than the U.S. President in America. Riveting, startling, and indispensable reading.

Download or read book The Extreme Centre written by Tariq Ali and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the centre ground Since 1989, politics has been a contest to see who can best serve the needs of the market. In this urgent and wideranging case for the prosecution, Tariq Ali looks at the people and events that have informed this development across the world. It is an investigation that reaches its logical conclusion with the presidency of Donald Trump, the success of En Marche! in France, and the dominance of Merkel’s Germany throughout Europe. In this fully updated edition of The Extreme Centre, Ali considers recent events that suggest, despite everything, that there is room for hope. He finds promise in Latin America and at the edges of Europe. Emerging parties in Scotland, Greece, and Spain, formed out of the 2008 crisis, are offering new promise for democracy. Even in the UK, with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, there are indications that the hegemony of the centre may be weaker than imagined.

Download or read book The Politics of Social Democracy written by Rob Manwaring and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the meaning of contemporary social democracy and how the centre-left is navigating through its current identity crisis, through a series of cases of social democratic and labour parties across Europe and the Anglosphere. The book examines the ideological, policy, electoral and organisational dilemmas facing the centre-left. Taking in cases including those from the UK, Austria, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand, it outlines and explores the current and future trajectories of the family of centre-left parties. This text will be of key interest to students, scholars and interested readers of labour and social democratic politics, centre-left political parties, trade unions, the future of the centre-left, and more broadly to those studying political parties, European and comparative politics.

Download or read book Politics at the Centre written by William P. Cross and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics at the Centre is a comparative study of the rules, norms and behaviour surrounding political party leadership. The primary analysis includes 25 parties in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom from 1965 onwards. The topics covered include methods of leadership selection and removal and the nature of leadership politics. The themes of the book include intra party democracy, with an emphasis on the relative roles of the parliamentary and extra parliamentary groups, and the causes of organizational reform within parties. Particular attention is paid to change over time and to differences among parties with explanations offered for both. Considerable attention is paid to the trend of expanding the leadership selectorate including consideration of why many parties are adopting this reform while others resist it. Data, collected from more than 200 leadership elections, are analyzed to consider issues such as the competitiveness of leadership contests, the types of individuals who win the contests and the longevity of leaders. The influence of different methods of selection and removal on these issues is also examined. Much of the analysis is based on in-country interviews conducted with active politicians, former and current party leaders, political journalists and officials of the extra parliamentary parties. Extensive use is also made of a comprehensive review of party documents related to leadership selection. Many real-life examples from all five countries are used to illustrate the central concepts and themes. A separate chapter considers the applicability of the findings from the Westminster systems to parties in other parliamentary and presidential systems. The concluding chapter makes a normative argument for a particular version of leadership selection and removal. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers 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.essex.ac.uk/ecpr. The Comparative Politics Series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Institute of Political Science, Philipps University, Marburg.

Download or read book Environmental Politics in the Middle East written by Harry Verhoeven and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018-11 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates how ecology and politics meet in the Middle East and how those interactions connect to the global political economy. Through region-wide analyses and case studies from the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf of Aden, the Levant and North Africa, the volume highlights the intimate connections of environmental activism, energy infrastructure and illicit commodity trading with the political economies of Central Asia, the Horn of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. The book's nine chapters analyze how the exploitation and representation of the environment have shaped the history of the region--and determined its place in global politics. It argues that how the ecological is understood, instrumentalized and intervened upon is the product of political struggle: deconstructing ideas and practices of environmental change means unravelling claims of authority and legitimacy. This is particularly important in a region frequently seen through the prism of environmental determinism, where ruling elites have imposed authoritarian control as the corollary of 'environmental crisis'. This unique and urgent collection will question much of what we think we know about this pressing issue.

Download or read book Politics of Opportunism written by and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Coalition Politics written by N. Jose Chander and published by Concept Publishing Company. This book was released on 2004 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an in-depth study of coalition governmentexperiments in India, with particular reference to the coalition politics at theCentre as well as in the states of Kerala and West Bengal.

Download or read book Why Leaders Lie written by John J. Mearsheimer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an analysis of the lying behavior of political leaders, discussing the reasons why it occurs, the different types of lies, and the costs and benefits to the public and other countries that result from it, with examples from the recent past.

Download or read book Saskatchewan Politics written by Howard A. Leeson and published by University of Regina Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his 2001 volume on politics in Saskatchewan, Howard Leeson observed that vast changes were underway in the Saskatchewan polity, and he predicted that the familiar politics of the past would soon look jarringly antiquated. The contributors to this new volume--Saskatchewan Politics: Crowding the Centre--come to the conclusion that this process of change is now largely complete. As its subtitle makes clear, this new study suggests that political parties in the province have crowded closer and closer to the ideological centre. Without the fulcrum of ideological division, politics in the province appears to be more and more about personal and administrative clashes and less and less about substantive differences as to how the economy and society should be organized. In short, left and right are increasingly being left out of provincial politics. Includes a dvd of the 2006-08 Throne and budget debates between NDP leader Lorne Calvert and Saskatchewan Party leader Brad Wall.

Download or read book Responsible Parties written by Frances Rosenbluth and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How popular democracy has paradoxically eroded trust in political systems worldwide, and how to restore confidence in democratic politics In recent decades, democracies across the world have adopted measures to increase popular involvement in political decisions. Parties have turned to primaries and local caucuses to select candidates; ballot initiatives and referenda allow citizens to enact laws directly; many places now use proportional representation, encouraging smaller, more specific parties rather than two dominant ones.Yet voters keep getting angrier.There is a steady erosion of trust in politicians, parties, and democratic institutions, culminating most recently in major populist victories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Frances Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro argue that devolving power to the grass roots is part of the problem. Efforts to decentralize political decision-making have made governments and especially political parties less effective and less able to address constituents’ long-term interests. They argue that to restore confidence in governance, we must restructure our political systems to restore power to the core institution of representative democracy: the political party.

Download or read book The Struggle to Stay written by Katie Gaddini and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evangelical Christianity is often thought of as oppressive to women. The #MeToo era, when many women hit a breaking point with rampant sexism, has also reached evangelical communities. Yet more than thirty million women in the United States still identify as evangelical. Why do so many women remain in male-dominated churches that marginalize them, and why do others leave? In each case, what does this cost them? The Struggle to Stay is an intimate and insightful portrait of single women’s experiences in evangelical churches. Drawing on unprecedented access to churches in the United States and the United Kingdom, Katie Gaddini relates the struggles of four women, interwoven with her own story of leaving behind a devout faith. She connects these personal narratives with rigorous analysis of Christianity and politics in both countries, and contextualizes them through interviews with more than fifty other evangelical women. Gaddini grapples with the complexities of obedience and resistance for women within a patriarchal religion against the backdrop of a culture war. Her exploration of how women choose to leave or remain in environments that constrain them is nuanced and personal, telling powerful stories of faith, community, isolation, and loss. Bringing together meticulous research and deep empathy, The Struggle to Stay provides a revelatory account of the private burdens that evangelical women bear.

Download or read book The Future of Election Administration written by Mitchell Brown and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-19 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the American election administration landscape changes as a result of major court cases, national and state legislation, changes in professionalism, and the evolution of equipment and security, so must the work of on-the-ground practitioners change. This Open Access title presents a series of case studies designed to highlight practical responses to these changes from the national, state, and local levels. This book is designed to be a companion piece to The Future of Election Administration, which surveys these critical dimensions of elections from the perspectives of the most forward-thinking practitioner, policy, advocacy, and research experts and leaders in these areas today. Drawing upon principles of professionalism and the practical work that is required to administer elections as part of the complex systems, this book lifts up the voices and experiences of practitioners from around the country to describe, analyze, and anticipate the key areas of election administration systems on which students, researchers, advocates, policy makers, and practitioners should focus. Together, these books add to the emerging body of literature that is part of the election sciences community with an emphasis on the practical aspects of administration.

Download or read book Between Centre and Locality written by Stewart Ranson and published by Unwin Hyman. This book was released on 1985 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book New Labour at the Centre written by Andrew Hindmoor and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-11-11 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking as its starting-point Anthony Downs' seminal work, An Economic Theory of Democracy, this book draws upon insights generated within economics, political psychology, and the study of rhetoric to examine the way in which New Labour achieved and maintained its electoral hegemony from 1994. Journalists and politicians routinely attribute New Labour's electoral success to its occupation of the 'centre-ground'. This book is interested in the question of how New Labour moved to the right and towards the centre. The obvious answer to this question is that New Labour moved by changing its policies. Against this, the book contends that changes in policy cannot in themselves constitute a complete explanation of changes in spatial position. They cannot do so because there is no pre-given and fixed relationship between policies and position such that the rejection of one policy and the adoption of another moves a party from one position to another. Policies are not immutably left-wing, right-wing, or centrist and so, given that the position a party is thought to occupy is a function of the policies to which it is committed, parties are not immutably left-wing, right-wing, or centrist either. The relationship between policy and position and thereby between parties and position is constructed and is in part constructed by parties themselves. New Labour did not simply move to the centre. It had to persuade the media, voters, and other parties that it had moved to the centre. New Labour achieved and maintained its electoral hegemony not simply by changing one set of policies for another. It achieved and maintained its hegemony by successfully constructing its policies as centrist.