Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Political Process - General

Most Americans admire the determination and drive of artists, athletes, and CEOs, but they seem to despise similar ambition in their elected officials. The structure of political representation and the separation of powers detailed in the United States Constitution were intended to restrain self-interested ambition. Because not all citizens have a desire to rule, republican democracies must choose leaders from pools of ambitious candidates while trying to prevent those same people from exploiting public power to dominate the less ambitious.

Ambition in America: Political Power...

From George Washington's decision to buy time for the new nation by signing the less-than-ideal Jay Treaty with Great Britain in 1795 to George W. Bush's order of a military intervention in Iraq in 2003, the matter of who is president of the United States is of the utmost importance. In this book, Fred Greenstein examines the leadership styles of the earliest presidents, men who served at a time when it was by no means certain that the American experiment in free government would succeed.

In his groundbreaking book The Presidential Difference, Greenstein evaluated the...

Can a country be a democracy if its government only responds to the preferences of the rich? In an ideal democracy, all citizens should have equal influence on government policy--but as this book demonstrates, America's policymakers respond almost exclusively to the preferences of the economically advantaged. Affluence and Influence definitively explores how political inequality in the United States has evolved over the last several decades and how this growing disparity has been shaped by interest groups, parties, and elections.

With sharp analysis and an impressive...

The Dynamics of Transitional Justice draws on the case of East Timor in order to reassess how transitional justice mechanisms actually play out at the local level. Transitional justice mechanisms including trials and truth commissions have become firmly entrenched as part of the United Nations tool-kit for successful post-conflict recovery. It is now commonly assumed that by establishing individual accountability for human rights violations, and initiating truth-seeking and reconciliation programs, individuals and societies will be assisted to come to terms with the violent past and states...

This book" "takes predominant crowd theory to task, questioning received ideas about mob psychology that remain prevalent today. It is a synchronic study of crowds, crowd dynamics, and the relationships of crowds to political power in Tunisia, Libya and Algeria (2011 13) that has far-reaching applications embedded in its thesis.

One central theme of the book is gender, providing an in-depth look at women s participation in the recent uprisings and crowds of 2011 13 and the subsequent gender-related aspects of political transitions. The book also focuses on the social and political...

No other attempt to explain French civil and military leadership during the 1930s has been so gracefully written, so firmly based on archival material, or so sensitive to French conditions and purposes as In Command of France. It combines a detailed survey of French foreign policy during the Nazi period with a careful examination of France's corresponding military planning and preparation. France was under control, the author argues, and credits the civilian and military command with more vision, more determination, more competence than hitherto recognized.

Young...

Taking its departure in the concept of strategic culture, this book answers the question of why European countries decide either to participate or not in international military operations. This volume examines strategic culture and its relation to justifications of decisions made by France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom, with regard to four different operations: Operation Enduring Freedom/ISAF in Afghanistan, Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq, Operation Unified Protector in Libya, and EU Navfor/Atalanta outside Somalia. In this work, the authors closely analyse the...