Is the 'golden age' of democracy really over due to the pressures of globalisation and the erosion of the nation state?

Within this book, Heinelt seeks to address the democratic deficit in political systems linked to limited Citizen Participation reflecting on the notion of democracy and participatory governance and how they relate to each other. Exploring democracy beyond the governmental structures and focusing on participatory governance in particular this book demonstrates that common notions of democracy have to be re-conceptualised without neglecting its key ideas. By arguing...

Problems involving minorities still constitute a significant challenge for public policies in countries such as the ones on the territories of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Unassimilated, facing the cultural "non-transparency" of their lifeworlds, and usually without autonomy, their problems are quite different from those in Western Europe and North America.

This book presents a study of public policies concerning the national, ethnic, and religious minorities in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It explores the opportunities available for applying the...

Heated debate surrounds the topic of health care in both the US and in Canada. In each country, these debates are based in some measure on perceptions about health care in their neighboring country. The perceptions held by Canadians about the US health care system, or those held by Americans about Canada, end up having significant impact on health policy makers in both countries.

Health Care Policy and Opinion in the United States and Canada examines these perceptions and their effects using an extensive cross-national survey made up of two public opinion polls of over 3,500...

Debates about children's rights not only concern those things that children have a right to have and to do but also our broader social and political community, and the moral and political status of the child within it.

This book examines children's rights and citizenship in the USA, UK and Australia and analyses the policy, law and sociology that govern the transition from childhood to adulthood. By examining existing debates on childhood citizenship, the author pursues the claim that childhood is the most heavily governed period of a liberal individual's life, and argues that...

Transformational Public Policy examines how governments can more effectively handle uncertainty and risk in an uncertain and changing world. Unpredictable and changing circumstances often bring nasty surprises that can increase waste in governance and public debt. This book illustrates how new methods derived from signal processing techniques can improve the practice of public policy by transforming it through rapid learning and adaptation. Interventions are processes of discovery, not compliance.

Transformational Public Policy shows readers how the power of hypothesis testing in...

This volume explores new directions of governance and public policy arising both from interpretive political science and those who engage with interpretive ideas. It conceives governance as the various policies and outcomes emerging from the increasing salience of neoclassical and institutional economics or, neoliberalism and new institutionalisms. In doing so, it suggests that that the British state consists of a vast array of meaningful actions that may coalesce into contingent, shifting, and contestable practices. Based on original fieldwork, it examines the myriad ways in which local...

Welfare-to-work or activation policies refer to programmes aimed at promoting the employability, labour-market and social participation of benefit recipients of working age. Frontline workers delivering these policies are conceived of as policy implementers, as policy makers, and as actors mediating politics in an arena where conflicting interests are at stake. Frontline work plays a crucial role in determining what welfare-to-work practically means and how it affects the lives of the people it targets. Yet few books have deliberatively focused on comparing what happens when frontline...