This book explores the interpretation of politicians' career goals. Members seek to win repeated reelection, in the U.S. House of Representatives and political scientists have assumed that reelection motivates politicians everywhere. However, politicians in Brazil see the national legislature as a stepping-stone to "higher" office, in state and/or local government. Making the right assumption about politicians' career goals results in a better understanding of the political processes. This book improves on previous "rational choice" analyses by researching political career objectives and...

In Only Love Can Break Your Heart, David Samuels writes with a reportorial acumen and stylistic flair that recall the pioneering New Journalism of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion. Combining elegant, nuanced personal essays with far-out reporting--on the lives of radicals in the Pacific Northwest, anti-abortion zealots, demolition experts, suburban hip-hop stars, and more--Samuels shows us an American landscape whose unsettling mix of profound dislocations and blue-sky optimism is both instantly recognizable and thrillingly new.

These essays display his unusual sensitivity to...

This book provides a framework for analyzing the impact of the separation of powers on party politics. Conventional political science wisdom assumes that democracy is impossible without political parties, because parties fulfill all the key functions of democratic governance. They nominate candidates, coordinate campaigns, aggregate interests, formulate and implement policy, and manage government power. When scholars first asserted the essential connection between parties and democracy, most of the world s democracies were parliamentary. Yet by the dawn of the twenty-first century, most...

Research on the economic origins of democracy and dictatorship has shifted away from the impact of growth and turned toward the question of how different patterns of growth equal or unequal shape regime change. This book offers a new theory of the historical relationship between economic modernization and the emergence of democracy on a global scale, focusing on the effects of land and income inequality. Contrary to most mainstream arguments, Ben W. Ansell and David J. Samuels suggest that democracy is more likely to emerge when rising, yet politically disenfranchised, groups demand more...

Research on the economic origins of democracy and dictatorship has shifted away from the impact of growth and turned toward the question of how different patterns of growth - equal or unequal - shape regime change. This book offers a new theory of the historical relationship between economic modernization and the emergence of democracy on a global scale, focusing on the effects of land and income inequality. Contrary to most mainstream arguments, Ben W. Ansell and David J. Samuels suggest that democracy is more likely to emerge when rising, yet politically disenfranchised, groups demand more...