Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Political Ideologies - Democracy

With public confidence in representative institutions dropping to distressing levels, it is time for political theorists to turn their attention to representation, and to reconceive its normative foundations and connections to other aspects of a revived public life.

This volume investigates theoretical and practical aspects of innovative political representation in the early 21st century. Some contributors tackle problematic dimensions of representation head on, while others explore democratic participation and deliberation, multicutural pluralism, contested citizenship, and other...

What place do first ministers, along with the cabinets they select, have in democratic life in Canada? Has cabinet really become just a focus group for the Prime Minister? Do political staff and central agency bureaucrats enhance or diminish democracy? Do private members have any say in the cabinet process?

In an accessible, thorough, and balanced fashion, this volume of the Canadian Democratic Audit examines the concentration of power in cabinet and the prime minister's office. Taking the view that to explain our Westminster-style government as a benign dictatorship is an...

This kind of global movement requires global communication. Political scientist Peter Russell has heeded the demand by bringing...

Bruno Kreisky (1911-1990) is undoubtedly the most prominent and influential politician to emerge in postwar Austria. For some thirty years, he helped to shape his country's politics and raise its status in the world, first as secretary of state, then as leader of the opposition Social Democratic Party and as foreign minster, and finally as chancellor from 1970 to 1983. During his long tenure of public office, Austria achieved unprecedented levels of prosperity; he promoted electoral and educational reform and weathered the occasional scandal.

His analytical mind and intelligence were...

The relationship between socioeconomic inequality and democratic politics has been one of the central questions in the social sciences from Aristotle on. Recent waves of democratization, combined with deepened global inequalities, have made understanding this relationship ever more crucial. In The Great Gap, Merike Blofield seeks to contribute to this understanding by analyzing inequality and politics in the region with the highest socioeconomic inequalities in the world: Latin America. The chapters, written by prominent scholars in their fields, address the socioeconomic context...

Too often, Wallace Hettle points out, studies of politics in the nineteenth-century South reinforce a view of the Democratic Party that is frozen in time on the eve of Fort Sumter--a deceptively high point of white racial solidarity. Avoiding such a "Civil War synthesis," "The Peculiar Democracy" illuminates the link between the Jacksonian political culture that dominated antebellum debate and the notorious infighting of the Confederacy. Hettle shows that war was the greatest test of populist Democratic Party rhetoric that emphasized the shared interests of white men, slaveholder and...

The world's democracies cheered as the social movements of the Arab Spring ended the reigns of longstanding dictators and ushered in the possibility of democracy. Yet these unique transitions also fit into a broader pattern of democratic breakthroughs around the globe, where political leaders emerge from the pro-democracy movement that helped affect change. In Social Movements and the New State, Brian Grodsky examines the relationships between new political elites and the civil society organizations that brought them to power in three culturally and geographically disparate...

According to received wisdom parties have played a mainly destructive role in French political development. Of questionable legitimacy, pursuing narrow sectarian goals, often corruptly, they have brought about division, weakness and the collapse of regimes. A proper reading of history suggests differently. By combining historical research and contemporary political science theory about party, the author shows that for over a century party has irrigated French democracy in often invisible ways, brokering working compromises between groups divided strongly along social, political and...

Experiences of solidarity have figured prominently in the politics of the modern era, from the rallying cry of liberation theology for solidarity with the poor and oppressed, through feminist calls for sisterhood, to such political movements as Solidarity in Poland. Yet very little academic writing has focused on solidarity in conceptual rather than empirical terms.

Sally Scholz takes on this critical task here. She lays the groundwork for a theory of political solidarity, asking what solidarity means and how it differs fundamentally from other social and political concepts like...