Download or read book Voting and Democratic Citizenship in Africa written by Michael Bratton and published by Lynne Rienner Pub. This book was released on 2013 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do individual Africans view competitive elections? How do they behave at election time? What are the implications of new forms of popular participation for citizenship and democracy? Drawing on a decade of research from the cross-national Afrobarometer project, the authors of this seminal collection explore the emerging role of mass politics in Africa¿s fledgling democracies.
Download or read book Why Do Elections Matter in Africa written by Nic Cheeseman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical new approach to understanding Africa's elections: explaining why politicians, bureaucrats and voters so frequently break electoral rules.
Download or read book Democracy A Very Short Introduction written by Bernard Crick and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2002-10-10 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No political concept is more used, and misused, than that of democracy. Nearly every regime today claims to be democratic, but not all 'democracies' allow free politics, and free politics existed long before democratic franchises. This book is a short account of the history of the doctrine and practice of democracy, from ancient Greece and Rome through the American, French, and Russian revolutions, and of the usages and practices associated with it in the modern world. It argues that democracy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for good government, and that ideas of the rule of law, and of human rights, should in some situations limit democratic claims. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Securing the Vote written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2018-09-30 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 2016 presidential election, America's election infrastructure was targeted by actors sponsored by the Russian government. Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy examines the challenges arising out of the 2016 federal election, assesses current technology and standards for voting, and recommends steps that the federal government, state and local governments, election administrators, and vendors of voting technology should take to improve the security of election infrastructure. In doing so, the report provides a vision of voting that is more secure, accessible, reliable, and verifiable.
Download or read book The University in Africa and Democratic Citizenship written by Thierry M. Luescher and published by African Minds. This book was released on 2011 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Report on student surveys conducted at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Download or read book Electoral Politics in Africa since 1990 written by Jaimie Bleck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democratic transitions in the early 1990s introduced a sea change in Sub-Saharan African politics. Between 1990 and 2015, several hundred competitive legislative and presidential elections were held in all but a handful of the region's countries. This book is the first comprehensive comparative analysis of the key issues, actors, and trends in these elections over the last quarter century. The book asks: what motivates African citizens to vote? What issues do candidates campaign on? How has the turn to regular elections promoted greater democracy? Has regular electoral competition made a difference for the welfare of citizens? The authors argue that regular elections have both caused significant changes in African politics and been influenced in turn by a rapidly changing continent - even if few of the political systems that now convene elections can be considered democratic, and even if many old features of African politics persist.
Download or read book The University in Africa and Democratic Citizenship written by M. Luescher-Mamashela and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether and how higher education in Africa contributes to democratisation beyond producing the professionals that are necessary for developing and sustaining a modern political system, remains an unresolved question. This report, then, represents an attempt to address the question of whether there are university specific mechanisms or pathways by which higher education contributes to the development of democratic attitudes and behaviours among students, and how these mechanisms operate and relate to politics both on and off campus. The research contained in this report shows that the potential of a university to act as training ground for democratic citizenship is best realised by supporting students' exercise of democratic leadership on campus. This, in turn, develops and fosters democratic leadership in civil society. Thus, the university's response to student political activity, student representation in university governance and other aspects of extra-curricular student life needs to be examined for ways in which African universities can instil and support democratic values and practices. Encouraging and facilitating student leadership in various forms of on-campus political activity and in a range of student organisations emerges as one of the most promising ways in which African universities can act as training grounds for democratic citizenship. The project on which this report is based forms part of a larger study on Higher Education and Democracy in Africa, undertaken by the Higher Education Research and Advocacy Network in Africa (HERANA). HERANA is coordinated by the Centre for Higher Education Transformation in South Africa.
Download or read book The Right to Vote written by Alexander Keyssar and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 2000, The Right to Vote was widely hailed as a magisterial account of the evolution of suffrage from the American Revolution to the end of the twentieth century. In this revised and updated edition, Keyssar carries the story forward, from the disputed presidential contest of 2000 through the 2008 campaign and the election of Barack Obama. The Right to Vote is a sweeping reinterpretation of American political history as well as a meditation on the meaning of democracy in contemporary American life.
Download or read book Electoral Commissions and Democratization in Africa written by Nicholas Kerr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-19 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do some countries hold elections that meet global democratic standards, while other countries do not? Electoral Commissions and Democratization in Africa makes a novel contribution to this question. In a departure from the typical story about the “boring” administrative tasks that electoral commissions carry out and their impact on international observers' assessments of election quality, Kerr aruges that electoral commissions provide valuable information that helps politicians and citizens resolve uncertainties about electoral fraud and administrative irregularities. Whereas previous research focuses on the institutional design of electoral commissions, this book privileges their actual performance and focuses on two attributes: autonomy and capacity. By serving an informational role, the autonomy and capacity of electoral commissions influences how citizens and elites think about and behave during elections. This includes whether political elites and citizens participate in elections, engage in electoral fraud and violence, accept electoral outcomes, and express confidence in elections. These attitudes and behaviors, in turn, influence whether elections meet democratic standards (election quality) and whether political elites and citizens regard election processes as acceptable (election legitimacy). This book brings together evidence from public opinion surveys, elite surveys, field research, and cross-national databases to give an unusually rich empirical exploration of the dynamics of elections and democracy in sub-Saharan Africa since the 1990s, with a focused case study of Nigeria. Electoral Commissions and Democratization in Africa will be appealing to scholars and policymakers interested in democratization and elections. Oxford Studies in African Politics and International Relations is a series for scholars and students working on African politics and International Relations and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on contemporary developments in African political science, political economy, and International Relations, such as electoral politics, democratization, decentralization, gender and political representation, the political impact of natural resources, the dynamics and consequences of conflict, comparative political thought, and the nature of the continent's engagement with the East and West. Comparative and mixed methods work is particularly encouraged, as is interdisciplinary research and work that considers ethical issues relating to the study of Africa. Case studies are welcomed but should demonstrate the broader theoretical and empirical implications of the study and its wider relevance to contemporary debates. The focus of the series is on sub-Saharan Africa, although proposals that explain how the region engages with North Africa and other parts of the world are of interest. Series Editors: Nic Cheeseman, Professor of Democracy and International Development, University of Birmingham; Peace Medie, Senior Lecturer in Gender and International Politics, University of Bristol; and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Professor of the International Politics of Africa, University of Oxford.
Download or read book Democracy for All written by Ronald Hayduk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Citizenship Law in Africa written by Bronwen Manby and published by African Minds. This book was released on 2012-07-27 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few African countries provide for an explicit right to a nationality. Laws and practices governing citizenship leave hundreds of thousands of people in Africa without a country to which they belong. Statelessness and discriminatory citizenship practices underlie and exacerbate tensions in many regions of the continent, according to this report by the Open Society Institute. Citizenship Law in Africa is a comparative study by the Open Society Justice Initiative and Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project. It describes the often arbitrary, discriminatory, and contradictory citizenship laws that exist from state to state, and recommends ways that African countries can bring their citizenship laws in line with international legal norms. The report covers topics such as citizenship by descent, citizenship by naturalization, gender discrimination in citizenship law, dual citizenship, and the right to identity documents and passports. It describes how stateless Africans are systematically exposed to human rights abuses: they can neither vote nor stand for public office; they cannot enroll their children in school, travel freely, or own property; they cannot work for the government.--Publisher description.
Download or read book Democracy in Africa written by Nic Cheeseman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of democracy in Africa and explains why the continent's democratic experiments have so often failed, as well as how they could succeed. Nic Cheeseman grapples with some of the most important questions facing Africa and democracy today, including whether international actors should try and promote democracy abroad, how to design political systems that manage ethnic diversity, and why democratic governments often make bad policy decisions. Beginning in the colonial period with the introduction of multi-party elections and ending in 2013 with the collapse of democracy in Mali and South Sudan, the book describes the rise of authoritarian states in the 1970s; the attempts of trade unions and some religious groups to check the abuse of power in the 1980s; the remarkable return of multiparty politics in the 1990s; and finally, the tragic tendency for elections to exacerbate corruption and violence.
Download or read book Reflections on the 2019 South African General Elections written by Joleen Steyn Kotze and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflections on the 2019 South African General Elections is a critical reflection on the key lessons of Elections 2019 in South Africa, focusing on the future of the country’s electoral democracy. The volume engages questions on land, election campaigns, voter turnout, voter apathy, and how opposition parties will be forced to co-exist in the context of declining electoral dominance the ANC once comfortably held. An important reflection on the lessons of the 2019 South African General Elections, the contributors ask: Quo Vadis South Africa? The 2019 General Elections marked a watershed in South Africa’s political landscape. The ANC under the banner of a narrative of regeneration and getting back on the moral path dipped below the 60 % mark for the first time in South Africa’s democratic history. This decline in electoral support for the party may be interpreted as a degeneration of the ANC through the loss of its moral stature, the erosion of its integrity and disillusionment with its performance as a governing party. Opposition political parties could not capitalise on this seeming disillusionment with the ruling ANC. Caught in their own factional battles and in the midst of corruption scandals, opposition parties were unable to successfully increase their share of the vote, and capture the undecided and disillusioned voter. Considering the future of South Africa’s electoral democracy at 25 years of democracy, Reflections on the 2019 South African General Elections will be of great interest to scholars of African Studies, South Africa, Governance and Elections. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies.
Download or read book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa written by Sam Hickey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A study prepared for the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER)"
Download or read book African Democratic Citizenship Education Revisited written by Yusef Waghid and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection explores how democratic citizenship education manifests across the African continent. A recognition of rights and responsibilities coupled with an emphasis on deliberative engagement among citizens, while not uniquely African, provides ample evidence that the concept can most appropriately be realised in relation to its connectedness with experiences of people living on the continent. Focussing on a diverse collection of voices, the editors and authors examine countries that have an overwhelming allegiance to democratic citizenship education. In doing so, they acknowledge that this concept, enveloped by a certain Africanness, has the potential to manifest in practices across the African continent. By highlighting the success of democratic citizenship education, the diverse and varied contributions from across this vast continent address the malaise in its implementation in countries where autocratic rule prevails. This pioneering volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers and students working in the fields of education and sociology, particularly those with an interest in education policy, philosophy of education and global citizenship initiatives.
Download or read book Social Media and Politics in Africa written by Maggie Dwyer and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The smartphone and social media have transformed Africa, allowing people across the continent to share ideas, organise, and participate in politics like never before. While both activists and governments alike have turned to social media as a new form of political mobilization, some African states have increasingly sought to clamp down on the technology, introducing restrictive laws or shutting down networks altogether. Drawing on over a dozen new empirical case studies – from Kenya to Somalia, South Africa to Tanzania – this collection explores how rapidly growing social media use is reshaping political engagement in Africa. But while social media has often been hailed as a liberating tool, the book demonstrates how it has often served to reinforce existing power dynamics, rather than challenge them. Featuring experts from a range of disciplines from across the continent, this collection is the first comprehensive overview of social media and politics in Africa. By examining the historical, political, and social context in which these media platforms are used, the book reveals the profound effects of cyber-activism, cyber-crime, state policing and surveillance on political participation.
Download or read book Democracy and Electoral Politics in Zambia written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy and Electoral Politics in Zambia aims to comprehend the current dynamics of Zambia’s democracy and to understand what was specific about the 2015/2016 election experience. While elections have been central to understanding Zambian politics over the last decade, the coverage they have received in the academic literature has been sparse. This book aims to fill that gap and give a more holistic account of contemporary Zambian electoral dynamics, by providing innovative analysis of political parties, mobilization methods, the constitutional framework, the motivations behind voters’ choices and the adjudication of electoral disputes by the judiciary. This book draws on insights and interviews, public opinion data and innovative surveys that aim to tell a rich and nuanced story about Zambia’s recent electoral history from a variety of disciplinary approaches. Contributors include: Tinenenji Banda, Nicole Beardsworth, John Bwalya, Privilege Haang’andu, Erin Hern, Marja Hinfelaar, Dae Un Hong, O’Brien Kaaba, Robby Kapesa, Chanda Mfula, Jotham Momba, Biggie Joe Ndambwa, Muna Ndulo, Jeremy Seekings, Hangala Siachiwena, Sishuwa Sishuwa, Owen Sichone, Aaron Siwale, Michael Wahman.
