Download or read book The Rise of the Unelected written by Frank Vibert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-07 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unelected bodies, such as independent central banks, economic regulators, risk managers and auditors have become a worldwide phenomenon. Democracies are increasingly turning to them to demarcate boundaries between the market and the state, to resolve conflicts of interest and to allocate resources, even in sensitive ethical areas such as those involving privacy or biotechnology. This book examines the challenge that unelected bodies present to democracy and argues that, taken together, such bodies should be viewed as a new branch of government with their own sources of legitimacy and held to account through a new separation of powers. Vibert suggests that such bodies help promote a more informed citizenry because they provide a more trustworthy and reliable source of information for decisions. This book will be of interest to specialists and general readers with an interest in modern democracy as well as policy makers, think tanks and journalists.
Download or read book Rise of the Unelected The Democracy and the Separation of Powers written by Frank Vibert and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unelected bodies, such as independent central banks, economic regulators, risk managers and auditors have become a worldwide phenomenon. Democracies are increasingly turning to them to demarcate boundaries between the market and the state, to resolve conflicts of interest and to allocate resources, even in sensitive ethical areas such as those involving privacy or biotechnology. This book examines the challenge that unelected bodies present to democracy and argues that, taken together, such bodies should be viewed as a new branch of government with their own sources of legitimacy and held to account through a new separation of powers. Vibert suggests that such bodies help promote a more informed citizenry because they provide a more trustworthy and reliable source of information for decisions. This book will be of interest to specialists and general readers with an interest in modern democracy as well as policy makers, think tanks and journalists.
Download or read book The Rise of the Unelected written by Frank Vibert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-07 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the challenge that unelected bodies such as economic regulators present to democracy, and argues that they should be seen as a new branch of government and held to account through a new separation of powers.
Download or read book Unelected Power written by Paul Tucker and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tucker presents guiding principles for ensuring that central bankers and other unelected policymakers remain stewards of the common good.
Download or read book The Unelected written by James R. Copland and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America is highly polarized around elections, but unelected actors make many of the decisions that affect our lives. In this lucid history, James R. Copland explains how unaccountable agents have taken over much of the U.S. government apparatus. Congress has largely abdicated its authority. “Independent” administrative agencies churn out thousands of new regulations every year. Courts have enabled these rulemakers to expand their powers beyond those authorized by law—and have constrained executive efforts to rein in the bureaucratic behemoth. No ordinary citizen can know what is legal and what is not. There are some 300,000 federal crimes, 98 percent of which were created by administrative action. The proliferation of rules gives enormous discretion to unelected enforcers, and the severity of sanctions can be ruinous to citizens who unwittingly violate a regulation. Outside the bureaucracy, private attorneys regulate our conduct through lawsuits. Most of the legal theories underlying these suits were never voted upon by our elected representatives. A combination of historical accident, decisions by judges and law professors, and self-interested advocacy by litigators has built an onerous and expensive legal regime. Finally, state and local officials may be accountable to their own voters, but some reach further afield, pursuing agendas to dictate the terms of national commerce. These new antifederalists are subjecting the citizens of Wyoming and Mississippi to the whims of the electorates of New York and San Francisco—contrary to the constitutional design. In these ways, the unelected have assumed substantial control of the American republic, upended the rule of law, given the United States the world’s costliest legal system, and inverted the Constitution’s federalism. Copland caps off his account with ideas for charting a corrective course back to democratic accountability.
Download or read book Stolen Sovereignty written by Daniel E. Horowitz and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In STOLEN SOVEREIGNTY Horowitz reveals just how disenfranchised voters have become. On issue after issue we are witnessing a transformation of our society before our very eyes, all without the ability to stop it through the political process. We are becoming a government not of the people, by the people, for the people, but of the elites by the justices and for the few. First the courts went after your income. Then they went after the right to abortion. Then the right for men to marry men and women to marry women. Next they will go after the right to our sovereign borders. Where will it end? It is the legislative branch that gives the people their voice. With a weak congress, the people will suffer at the hands of a tyrannical few. By ceding the power of the purse, willfully ignoring executive overreach, blindly confirming judicial nominees, and writing statutes so broadly they transfer full legislative power to the president, the past few generations of congressmen have helped the executive branch and the courts crush their own power. STOLEN SOVEREIGNTY is a book defending sovereignty and society from the courts. Horowitz masterfully explains the legal foundations of this great nation and how the three branches of government are designed to keep the people free. He outlines how the recent overreach of the judicial branch has led to the extinguishing of the voice of the people. And most important, he provides solutions as the looming immigration crisis overshadows the political landscape. As we hunger for leaders who will steer the country back on the track of liberty and justice for all, we must ensure we are never one court decision or one executive order away from losing our society, sovereignty, and government. The courts have spoken. Now, it's time for the American people to reclaim their sovereignty.
Download or read book Dark Money written by Jane Mayer and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR Who are the immensely wealthy right-wing ideologues shaping the fate of America today? From the bestselling author of The Dark Side, an electrifying work of investigative journalism that uncovers the agenda of this powerful group. In her new preface, Jane Mayer discusses the results of the most recent election and Donald Trump's victory, and how, despite much discussion to the contrary, this was a huge victory for the billionaires who have been pouring money in the American political system. Why is America living in an age of profound and widening economic inequality? Why have even modest attempts to address climate change been defeated again and again? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? In a riveting and indelible feat of reporting, Jane Mayer illuminates the history of an elite cadre of plutocrats—headed by the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Olins, and the Bradleys—who have bankrolled a systematic plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. Mayer traces a byzantine trail of billions of dollars spent by the network, revealing a staggering conglomeration of think tanks, academic institutions, media groups, courthouses, and government allies that have fallen under their sphere of influence. Drawing from hundreds of exclusive interviews, as well as extensive scrutiny of public records, private papers, and court proceedings, Mayer provides vivid portraits of the secretive figures behind the new American oligarchy and a searing look at the carefully concealed agendas steering the nation. Dark Money is an essential book for anyone who cares about the future of American democracy. National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist LA Times Book Prize Finalist PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist Shortlisted for the Lukas Prize
Download or read book Undemocratic written by Jay Sekulow and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jay Sekulow—one of America’s most influential attorneys—explores a post Obama landscape where bureaucracy has taken over our government and provides a practical roadmap to help take back our personal liberties. Jay Sekulow is on a mission to defend Americans’ freedom. The fact is that freedom is under attack like never before. The threat comes from the fourth branch of government—the biggest branch—and the only branch not in the Constitution: the federal bureaucracy. The bureaucracy imposes thousands of new laws every year, without a single vote from Congress. The bureaucracy violates the rights of Americans without accountability—persecuting adoptive parents, denying veterans quality healthcare, discriminating against conservatives and Christians for partisan purposes, and damaging our economy with job-killing rules. Americans are bullied by the very institutions established to protect their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our nation’s bureaucrats are on an undemocratic power trip. But Sekulow has a plan to fight back. We can resist illegal abuse, we can reform a broken system, and we can restore American democracy. This book won’t just tell you how to win, it will show you real victories achieved by Sekulow and the American Center for Law and Justice. Unless we can roll back the fourth branch of government—the most dangerous branch—our elections will no longer matter. Undemocratic is a wake-up call, a call made at just the right time—before it’s too late to save the democracy we love.
Download or read book Empire of Democracy written by Simon Reid-Henry and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first panoramic history of the Western world from the 1970s to the present day, Empire of Democracy is the story for those asking how we got to where we are. Half a century ago, at the height of the Cold War and amidst a world economic crisis, the Western democracies were forced to undergo a profound transformation. Against what some saw as a full-scale “crisis of democracy”— with race riots, anti-Vietnam marches and a wave of worker discontent sowing crisis from one nation to the next— a new political-economic order was devised and the postwar social contract was torn up and written anew. In this epic narrative of the events that have shaped our own times, Simon Reid-Henry shows how liberal democracy, and western history with it, was profoundly reimagined when the postwar Golden Age ended. As the institutions of liberal rule were reinvented, a new generation of politicians emerged: Thatcher, Reagan, Mitterrand, Kohl. The late twentieth century heyday they oversaw carried the Western democracies triumphantly to victory in the Cold War and into the economic boom of the 1990s. But equally it led them into the fiasco of Iraq, to the high drama of the financial crisis in 2007/8, and ultimately to the anti-liberal surge of our own times. The present crisis of liberalism enjoins us to revisit these as yet unscripted decades. The era we have all been living through is closing out, democracy is turning on its axis once again. As this panoramic history poignantly reminds us, the choices we make going forward require us first to come to terms with where we have been.
Download or read book The Life and Death of Democracy written by John Keane and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 717 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Keane's The Life and Death of Democracy will inspire and shock its readers. Presenting the first grand history of democracy for well over a century, it poses along the way some tough and timely questions: can we really be sure that democracy had its origins in ancient Greece? How did democratic ideals and institutions come to have the shape they do today? Given all the recent fanfare about democracy promotion, why are many people now gripped by the feeling that a bad moon is rising over all the world's democracies? Do they indeed have a future? Or is perhaps democracy fated to melt away, along with our polar ice caps? The work of one of Britain's leading political writers, this is no mere antiquarian history. Stylishly written, this superb book confronts its readers with an entirely fresh and irreverent look at the past, present and future of democracy. It unearths the beginnings of such precious institutions and ideals as government by public assembly, votes for women, the secret ballot, trial by jury and press freedom. It tracks the changing, hotly disputed meanings of democracy and describes quite a few of the extraordinary characters, many of them long forgotten, who dedicated their lives to building or defending democracy. And it explains why democracy is still potentially the best form of government on earth -- and why democracies everywhere are sleepwalking their way into deep trouble.
Download or read book What Washington Gets Wrong written by Jennifer Bachner and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book reveals a surprising ignorance on the part of unelected federal officials regarding the life circumstances and opinions of average Americans as well as an attitude of condescension"--
Download or read book The Confidence Game written by Steven Solomon and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first behind-closed-doors look at the elite cadre that controls the international money supply draws on hundreds of exclusive interviews and provides never-before-reported details of cloistered negotiations to reveal how perilously close the global economy has often come to collapsing.
Download or read book A Theory of Freedom written by Philip Pettit and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative approach to freedom starts from an account of what we mean by describing someone, in a psychological vein, as a free subject. Pettit develops an argument as to what it is that makes someone free in that basic sense; and then goes on to derive the implications of the approach for issues of freedom in political theory. Freedom in the subject is equated with the person's being fit to be held responsible and to be authorized as a partner in interaction. This book is unique among contemporary approaches - although it is true to the spirit of classical writers like Hobbes and Kant - in seeking a theory that applies to psychological issues of free agency and free will as well as to political issues in the theory of the free state and the free constitution. The driving thesis is that it is only by connecting up the different issues of freedom, psychological and political, that we can fully appreciate the nature of the questions involved, and the requirements for their resolution. The book does not not seek a comprehensive reach just for its own sake, but rather for the sake of the illumination it provides. A Theory of Freedom is a ground-breaking volume which will be of wide interest to scholars and students in political philosophy and political science.
Download or read book Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy written by Michael Albertus and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that - in terms of institutional design, the allocation of power and privilege, and the lived experiences of citizens - democracy often does not restart the political game after displacing authoritarianism. Democratic institutions are frequently designed by the outgoing authoritarian regime to shield incumbent elites from the rule of law and give them an unfair advantage over politics and the economy after democratization. Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy systematically documents and analyzes the constitutional tools that outgoing authoritarian elites use to accomplish these ends, such as electoral system design, legislative appointments, federalism, legal immunities, constitutional tribunal design, and supermajority thresholds for change. The study provides wide-ranging evidence for these claims using data that spans the globe and dates from 1800 to the present. Albertus and Menaldo also conduct detailed case studies of Chile and Sweden. In doing so, they explain why some democracies successfully overhaul their elite-biased constitutions for more egalitarian social contracts.
Download or read book Democracy and Truth written by Sophia Rosenfeld and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fake news," wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies—citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way. The problem may be novel in some of its details—including the role of today's political leaders, along with broadcast and digital media, in intensifying the epistemic anarchy—but the challenge of determining truth in a democratic world has a backstory. In this lively and illuminating book, historian Sophia Rosenfeld explores a longstanding and largely unspoken tension at the heart of democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite made up of trusted experts. What we are witnessing now is the unraveling of the détente between these competing aspects of democratic culture. In four bracing chapters, Rosenfeld substantiates her claim by tracing the history of the vexed relationship between democracy and truth. She begins with an examination of the period prior to the eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions, where she uncovers the political and epistemological foundations of our democratic world. Subsequent chapters move from the Enlightenment to the rise of both populist and technocratic notions of democracy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the troubling trends—including the collapse of social trust—that have led to the rise of our "post-truth" public life. Rosenfeld concludes by offering suggestions for how to defend the idea of truth against the forces that would undermine it.
Download or read book She Will Rise written by Katie Hill and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Former Congresswoman Katie Hill shares her experience with misogyny and double standards in politics to help women topple the longstanding power structures that prevent them from achieving equality. Powerful women who dare to make mistakes still face swifter and more brutal consequences than men, as the events that precipitated Congressional representative Katie Hill's resignation, in which she was the victim of revenge porn, clearly demonstrate. But Katie Hill does not want women to be discouraged from taking positions of power -- in fact, the rampant misogyny we see is all the more reason for women to lead, to work to change the systems that have kept old, wealthy, white men in power for far too long. In this book, to be published on the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment (which gave women the right to vote), Katie Hill looks back on the progress we've made and outlines her battle plan for our future. She details how we can overcome the obstacles holding women back from achieving equal representation in positions of power to create the change we want for the next century. What challenges do women face in the modern era, and what battles will we need to fight in the years to come? Katie Hill is ready to equip readers for the front lines of leadership in all arenas, to guide women in becoming the warriors we need to shape this country for the better.
Download or read book Bureaucracy in America written by Joseph Postell and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2017-07-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of the administrative state is the most significant political development in American politics over the past century. While our Constitution separates powers into three branches, and requires that the laws are made by elected representatives in the Congress, today most policies are made by unelected officials in agencies where legislative, executive, and judicial powers are combined. This threatens constitutionalism and the rule of law. This book examines the history of administrative power in America and argues that modern administrative law has failed to protect the principles of American constitutionalism as effectively as earlier approaches to regulation and administration.
