Ever since the end of China's civil war in 1949, Taiwan has embarked on its own distinct, divergent path of development. In light of its remarkable achievements and inherent difficulties, therefore, Taiwan should not be considered a renegade province of China, but a society with a democratically-elected government that has taken a route different from the rest of China in developing its own cultural norms and values. This book examines the issues of democratic transition, political imprisonment and the political economy in Taiwan.

The democratic experiment in Africa has had a checkered history over the past ten years. Analysts of this process tend to focus on the political and legal space instead of including broader issues such as norms, generational change and class. Authors in this volume argue that African civil society is less likely to support democracy, they measure African democracy by the women's rights movements, unravel the mythical hope of technology and point to ideological capitulation necessary for a limited transition. Past experience from Botswana, South-Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda and Madagascar will...

This book, prepared under the auspices of the ISA research committee on Comparative Sociology, focuses on a worldwide phenomenon: political mistrust, observable in almost all countries, in both established democracies and in authoritarian regimes. But ubiquity does not signify uniformity. The diversity of political regimes generates a multiplicity of forms and intensities of mistrust. Political mistrust seems inherent even in advanced democracies and in semi-democracies, where citizens are better prepared and more prone to criticize the dysfunctions of institutions and condemn the misconduct...

In 1981, the European and World Values surveys started the empirical investigations of value orientations on a global scale. This volume builds on these surveys, which now cover a time period of a quarter of a century. Two chapters discuss basic theoretical and methodological issues of value research, while four chapters focus on contemporary processes of value change: cultural globalization, individualization, secularization and democratization. These analyses of the data from the value surveys give new life to social science classics such as Tocqueville, Durkheim, Marx and Weber. The...

Elites come in many forms, as reflected by this collection. From overview to comparative studies in diverse contexts, this work is both historical and contemporary, encompassing case studies of elite individuals as well as elites in nations and political environments.

This anthology unites in one volume two studies of the Greater Middle East in global politics - each conceptual and empirical. First, it is a historical-comparative study of politics and societies in selected Greater Middle Eastern countries from Napoleon's invasion of Ottoman Egypt in 1798 up until today. It addresses development and change in these societies as results of the complex interactions between external developments, the rise and expansion of European industrialized powers, and internal developments, the disintegration of Islamic Empires, their transformation into nation-states,...

This book is a collection of notable papers from the first six volumes of the journal Comparative Sociology. Its content represents leading-edge and contemporarily astute analyses in the burgeoning science of comparative sociology, especially relevant to a globalizing world in transition. Given that not everyone is acquainted with comparative sociology, this book offers an opportunity to enlighten readers unfamiliar with the discipline about the importance of comparative sociology to the new world order. Taken together, the articles illuminate various aspects of comparative...

Whilst scholarship on women's suffrage usually focuses on a few emblematic countries, The Struggle for Female Suffrage in Europe casts a comparative look at the articulation of women's suffrage rights in the countries that now make up the political-unity-in-the-making we call the European Union. The book uncovers the dynamics that were at play in the recognition of male and female suffrage rights and in the definition of male and female citizenship in modern Europe. It allows readers to identify differences and commonalities in the histories of women's disenfranchisement and sheds...

Classical Sociology Beyond Methodological Nationalism defends classical sociology from the accusation of 'methodological nationalism'. To reject such accusation, the volume presents three arguments. The first contends that classical sociology has not failed to deal with the global world (Part I). The second, that classical sociology has more frequently dealt with the transnational category of the 'social', rather than with the 'national' (Part II). The third, that where classical sociology has analysed national society, the latter has never been envisaged as a rigidly confined entity...