Over the past several years, transparency has swept the world. India and South Africa have adopted groundbreaking national freedom of information laws. China is on the verge of promulgating new...

National governments are proving ill-equipped to manage an increasingly complicated portfolio of global problems. In The Coming Democracy, political analyst Ann Florini sets forth a compelling new paradigm for transnational governance. It is based on the concept of "transparency," the idea that the free flow of information --on topics ranging from corporate and government behavior to nuclear proliferation to biodiversity protection --provides powerful ways to hold decisionmakers accountable and to give ordinary people meaningful voice in shaping the policies that affect them. Thanks to...

All societies face a key question: how to empower governments to perform essential governmental functions while constraining the arbitrary exercise of power. This balance, always in flux, is particularly fluid in today's China. This insightful book examines the changing relationship between that state and its society, as demonstrated by numerous experiments in governance at subnational levels, and explores the implications for China's future political trajectory.

Ann Florini, Hairong Lai, and Yeling Tan set their analysis at the level of townships and counties, investigating the striking...