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1
Curriculum reform in Ontario: 'common sense' policy processes and democratic possibilities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
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2
The World Bank's disclosure policy review and the role of democratic participatory processes in achieving successful development outcomes: Hearing before the Committee on Financial Services, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Eleventh Congress, first session, September 10, 2009. Washington, D.C: U.S. G.P.O., 2010.
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3
United States. President (2001-2009 : Bush). Blocking property of persons undermining democratic processes or institutions in Zimbabwe: Message from the President of the United States transmitting his declaration of a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy interests of the United States posed by the actions and policies of certain individuals who have formulated, implemented, or supported policies that have undermined Zimbabwe's democratic institutions, pursuant to 50 U.S.C. 1703(b) and 50 U.S.C. 1631. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 2003.
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4
1946-, Bush George W., and United States. Congress. House. Committee on International Relations, eds. Blocking property of persons undermining democratic processes or institutions in Zimbabwe: Message from the President of the United States transmitting his declaration of a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy interests of the United States posed by the actions and policies of certain individuals who have formulated, implemented, or supported policies that have undermined Zimbabwe's democratic institutions, pursuant to 50 U.S.C. 1703(b) and 50 U.S.C. 1631. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 2003.
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5
Bush), United States President (2001-2009 :. Blocking property of persons undermining democratic processes or institutions in Zimbabwe: Message from the President of the United States transmitting his declaration of a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy interests of the United States posed by the actions and policies of certain individuals who have formulated, implemented, or supported policies that have undermined Zimbabwe's democratic institutions, pursuant to 50 U.S.C. 1703(b) and 50 U.S.C. 1631. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 2003.
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6
Connolly, William E. Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Duke University Press, 2013.
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7
Connolly, William E. The fragility of things: Self-organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, and democratic activism. 2013.
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8
Neil, Coleman, and Cosatu, eds. Accelerating transformation: COSATU's engagement with policy and legislative processes during South Africa's first term of democratic governance. [South Africa: COSATU, 2000.
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9
Fishman, Robert M. Democratic Practice. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190912871.001.0001.
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This book offers a new way to conceptualize and study differences among democracies, focusing on political conduct and interaction as well as related taken-for-granted assumptions. With an empirical basis in a multimethod study of Portugal and Spain, pioneers in the worldwide turn to democracy that began in the 1970s, the argument identifies how political inclusion and equality vary substantially as a result of processes that the book theorizes: Nationally predominant forms of democratic practice constitute cultural legacies of the countries’ pathways to democracy during the 1970s. Whereas Portugal moved from dictatorship to democracy through a social revolution that inverted hierarchies and reconfigured cultural patterns while also generating thorough political democratization, Spain experienced a regime-led process of political transition under pressure from the opposition. The book shows how this contrast in pathways put in place ways of understanding democracy that have had deep consequences for political inclusion and conduct. Points of contrast in contemporary democratic practice include patterns of interaction between social movement protest and elected power holders as well as conduct within representative entities and in crucial secondary institutions such as the news media and the educational system. Consequences are identified in distributional outcomes, housing and welfare state policies, employment policy, and in the handling of economic crises. The implications of Spain’s less inclusionary democratic practice for cultural “others” such as Catalans are taken up in the chapter on the Catalan crisis. Implications for democratic theory and for sociological and political science theory are also taken up.
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Psygkas, Athanasios. From the Democratic Deficit to a Democratic Surplus. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190632762.001.0001.
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The conventional account of a European Union (EU) “democratic deficit” misses part of the story. This book argues that member-state regulatory processes operating under EU mandates may actually have become more democratically accountable, not less. EU law creates entry points for stakeholder participation in the operation of national regulatory authorities; these avenues for public participation were formerly either not open or not institutionalized to this degree. In these cases, we see not a democratic deficit but a democratic surplus generated by EU law in the member states. Moreover, the decentralized EU regulatory structure may promote experimentation, innovation, and policy exchange between the member states. The book discusses a series of case studies demonstrating how EU law influenced telecommunications regulation in France, Greece, and the United Kingdom. It assesses the operation of accountability processes by drawing on data from more than 1,000 public consultations and some 8,000 consultation responses. The analysis is supplemented by interviews with agency officials as well as industry and consumer group representatives in Paris, Athens, Brussels, and London. The study finds increased participation by actors other than the traditional powerful firms as well as significant transparency gains compared to the previous regime. Nonetheless, the three countries did not respond to EU pressures in an identical fashion. The book compares how the same EU mandates were translated into divergent institutional practices as a result of the different administrative traditions, bureaucratic culture, and public law history of these countries. It also documents roadblocks and difficulties along the way.
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't Hart, Paul, and Mallory Compton, eds. Great Policy Successes. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198843719.001.0001.
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Contrary to stereotype, democratic governments are not so bad at what they do. What can we learn about the craft and politics of policy design and policy implementation from instances of public policy success? Systematically distinguishing between program, process, political success as wel as endurance of success over time, this volume presents fifteen in-depth case studies of policy successes from around the world. Each case study contains a detailed narrative of the policy processes and assesses the extent to which the policies pursued can be regarded as successful. It offers a unique tool for researchers, teachers and students to apply theories of policy design, policymaking, and implementation to.
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Pollack, Mark A. 2. Theorizing EU Policy-Making. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/hepl/9780199689675.003.0002.
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This chapter examines various theories on European Union policy-making and policy processes. It begins with a discussion of theories of European integration: neo-functionalism, intergovernmentalism, liberal intergovernmentalism, the ‘new institutionalisms’, constructivism, and realism. It then considers the increasing number of studies that approach the EU through the lenses of comparative politics and comparative public policy, focusing on the federal or quasi-federal aspects of the EU and its legislative, executive, and judicial politics. It also explores the vertical and horizontal separation of powers in the EU and concludes by looking at the ‘governance approach’ to the EU, with emphasis on multi-level governance and EU policy networks, Europeanization, and the question of the EU’s democratic deficit.
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Jacoby, William G., and Saundra K. Schneider. State Policy and Democratic Representation. Edited by Donald P. Haider-Markel. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199579679.013.023.
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The authors in this chapter emphasize state policy variation with respect to democratic representation of public interests. They examine the literature concerning the connection between public opinion and the actions of government officials and institutions. The authors consider the various approaches that have been employed in the scholarly literature to measure public opinion in the states. They also explore the ways that researchers have captured state-level public policy in empirical indicators. The authors then discuss strategies for representing the relationship between state opinion and policy, as well as various factors that may mediate the connection between the two. In this process the authors cover the existing literature and also highlight unresolved issues and potential future directions for scholarly research.
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Epstein, William M. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190467067.003.0001.
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The Introduction argues against the possibilities that power in the United States has been usurped by illegitimate elites or an autonomous federal government, or that pluralism has been seriously compromised. American decision making is democratic but populist rather than elitist, and defined by its embedded romantic notions in rejection of pragmatism. The Introduction lays out the proposition that policy making in the United States is determined by a broad democratic consensus. In spite of episodic pitfalls and threats to democratic processes, mass preferences prevail in policy making rather than the far more common assumption that conspiracies of illegitimate elites rule the nation. Democratic consent is formed more through an ecology of detached roles than through coherent and objective consideration.
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Leffler, Melvyn P. Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism. Princeton University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691196510.001.0001.
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This book gathers together decades of writing by the author, to address important questions about U.S. national security policy from the end of World War I to the global war on terror. Why did the United States withdraw strategically from Europe after World War I and not after World War II? How did World War II reshape Americans' understanding of their vital interests? What caused the United States to achieve victory in the long Cold War? To what extent did 9/11 transform U.S. national security policy? Is budgetary austerity a fundamental threat to U.S. national interests? The wide-ranging chapters explain how foreign policy evolved into national security policy. The book stresses the competing priorities that forced policymakers to make agonizing trade-offs and illuminates the travails of the policymaking process itself. While assessing the course of U.S. national security policy, the author also interrogates the evolution of his own scholarship. Over time, slowly and almost unconsciously, the author's work has married elements of revisionism with realism to form a unique synthesis that uses threat perception as a lens to understand how and why policymakers reconcile the pressures emanating from external dangers and internal priorities.
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1935-, Lasker G. E., International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics., and International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics and Cybernetics (8th : 1996 : Baden-Baden, Germany), eds. Advances in sociocybernetics and human development: Dialogue of cultures, planetary thinking and cultural synergy, cross-cultural research methodology, policy development and implementation, promoting democratic reforms, population policy analysis, global problems and global knowledge, assumptive worlds and pseudo-environments formation, modeling interactions in human systems, measuring interactions of the economy and the environment, transitional processes in Central and Eastern Europe. Windsor, Ont: International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, 1996.
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Scoones, Ian. Agricultural Futures. Edited by Ronald J. Herring. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195397772.013.031.
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Global assessments have become central to international debates on a range of key policy issues. They attempt to combine “expert assessment” with processes of “stakeholder consultation” in what are presented as global, participatory assessments on key issues of major international importance. This chapter focuses on the IAASTD—the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development—through a detailed analysis of the underlying knowledge politics involved, centered particularly on the controversy over genetically modified crops. Global assessments contribute to a new landscape of governance in the international arena, offering the potential for links between the local and the global and new ways of articulating citizen engagement with global processes of decision making and policy. The chapter argues that in global assessments the politics of knowledge need to be made more explicit and that negotiations around politics and values must be put center stage. The black-boxing of uncertainty, or the eclipsing of more fundamental clashes over interpretation and meaning, must be avoided for processes of participation and engagement in global assessments to become more meaningful, democratic, and accountable. A critique is thus offered of simplistic forms of deliberative democratic practice and the need to “bring politics back in” is affirmed.
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War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public Influences Foreign Policy. Princeton University Press, 2015.
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Shapiro, Robert Y. Public Opinion. Edited by Richard Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert Lieberman. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697915.013.020.
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Public opinion warrants increasing attention in research on American political development. It is central to the study of democratic politics, and it is involved with political processes that are sensitive to time and historical context. It can be studied using the methods of social and political historians and increasingly through data from opinion polls. Studies of democracy in action are arguably the most important, focusing on the causal relationship between public opinion and government policymaking, including the institutional processes and mechanisms that link the two. Given that public opinion can have important effects on what leaders, institutions, and governments do, it has become increasingly important to study the influences on both public opinion overall and different segments of it that might be most politically consequential. These influences include especially mass communication processes and also “policy feedback” effects on the public’s behavior broadly.
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Roach, Kent. The Supreme Court on Trial: Judicial Activism or Democratic Dialogue (Law and Public Policy). Irwin Law, 2001.
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21
Landwehr, Claudia. Depoliticization, Repoliticization, and Deliberative Systems. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198748977.003.0003.
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Deliberative democracy is increasingly criticized as inherently elitist and technocratic, and it is blamed not only for the rise of depoliticized institutions, but also for the rise of anti-political and even populist attitudes in citizens. The chapter analyses the discussion about the depoliticizing implications and effects of deliberation and argues that, contrary to these critics, deliberation must be viewed as a genuinely political mode of interaction. A systemic perspective on deliberation allows us to critically assess the deliberative and democratic qualities of political systems and to see when and where they fail to deliver on their promises. Applied with critical intentions, the deliberative system perspective can be used to identify depoliticized policy areas and undemocratic decision-making processes. Moreover, it can feed into processes of meta-deliberation that allow for a democratization of institutional design.
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Левашов, В. К., Н. М. Великая, И. С. Шушпанова, В. А. Афанасьев, О. В. Гребняк, and О. П. Новоженина. Social state and civil society in the context of implementation of nation projects. Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.19181/monogr.978-5-896-973522.2021.
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The collective monograph presents the results of the sociological monitoring "Social state and civil society in the context of the implementation of national projects", carried out within the framework of the 50th stage of the Russian sociological monitoring "How are you, Russia?" (August-September 2020), reflecting the dynamics of perception the socio-political situation in Russia by the main groups and strata of the population. The authors analyze the processes of the formation of the social state and civil society taking place in society in a pandemic, the social well-being of Russians in recent years, the dynamics of their attitude to the state, its policy, ensuring the norms of democratic development and the implementation of national projects. For researchers, analysts, teachers, postgraduates, students specializing in the study of sociopolitical processes, politicians, organizers and activists of election campaigns, management personnel.
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Eppler, Annegret, and Andreas Maurer, eds. Europapolitische Koordination in Österreich. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5771/9783845297033.
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European policy exerts a considerable influence on shaping politics in Austria. Vice versa, Austrian policy forms a constitutive element of what is negotiated and decided in Brussels. This book addresses the question of how and under which externally and internally induced framework conditions Austrian ideas, strategies and interests are conceived, coordinated and articulated in the multilevel system of the European Union. What domestic coordination requirements and strategies come into play and when in order to generate Austria’s positions? How do feedback mechanisms function in order to safeguard democratic and transparent decision-making chains? How do Austria’s political system and the EU’s supranational system influence each other? This book is the first to conduct a comprehensive analysis of all the players, institutions and processes involved in Austria’s policy on Europe as well as the policy areas that are particularly important for the country. It will appeal to students and teachers of EU studies and researchers on that subject area, those involved in Austria’s policy on Europe who work in parliament, government, administrative bodies and interest groups, as well as all those interested in comparing the coordination of policies on Europe.
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Dalton, Russell J. The Evolution of Political Competition. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198830986.003.0001.
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This chapter describes how societal changes over the past several decades have reshaped the social and political interests of democratic citizens. Publics and parties have traditionally focused on the economic cleavage as a basis of electoral politics. The processes of social modernization have produced a second cultural cleavage based on environmentalism, gender equality, immigration, and identity politics. New social movements advocating these issues have stimulated a conservative backlash. This cultural cleavage now exerts influence equal to economics in shaping citizens’ policy demands. A two-dimensional space for political competition has gradually evolved to represent these new political interests, producing new parties on the far left and far right. Longitudinal data from the European Election Studies allow us to track these changes in both citizen and elite opinions from the 1970s to 2014.
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Norris, Pippa. Electoral Transparency, Accountability, and Integrity. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190677800.003.0011.
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This concluding chapter looks at the links connecting transparency, accountability, and compliance. In particular, it considers an ideal model of electoral accountability. Yet it is unclear whether dissatisfaction with the conduct of elections translates into voting preferences at the ballot box, and there are many conditions under which this ideal model fails, even in democratic states. To illuminate, the chapter compares some selected case studies, including Watergate in the United States, the Fujimori scandal and the Peruvian general election in 2000, and the Recruit scandal and Japanese elections in 1993. Finally, it assesses the more general lessons arising from contributions to this book, considers the broader consequences of the transparency-accountability-compliance nexus for understanding processes of electoral integrity and malpractice, and identifies some of the key policy implications that follow from the analysis.
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Valelly, Richard, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert Lieberman, eds. The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697915.001.0001.
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Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics – and thus they question stylized facts about America’s political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time – and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance?
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Gender and Power: Towards Equality and Democratic Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
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Bäck, Hanna, and Torbjörn Bergman. The Parties in Government Formation. Edited by Jon Pierre. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199665679.013.12.
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This chapter focuses on the role of political parties in the government formation process. Swedish governments have had a clear-cut bloc political character, with the “socialist” parties in one camp and the “nonsocialist” parties in the other. Other features of the historical record also stand out. One example is that many postwar governments have been minority cabinets, often single-party governments. These have often been Social Democratic. The Social Democrats have ruled with the support of the Left Party and, more recently, the Greens. In the period 1998–2006, there were even written policy agreements (contracts) between the governing Social Democrats and the two “support” parties. When coalitions form, the parties divide the ministerial portfolios in a way that is proportional to the size of each party, and during the last decades a gender balance in the cabinet has become an explicit ambition.
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de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno. Foreign Policy Analysis and Rational Choice Models. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.395.
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Since the end of World War II, foreign policy thinking has been dominated by a realist (or neorealist) perspective in which states are taken as the relevant unit of analysis. The focus on states as the central actors in international politics leads to the view that what happens within states is of little consequence for understanding what happens between states. However, state-centric, unitary rational actor theories fail to explain perhaps the most significant empirical discovery in international relations over the past several decades. That is the widely accepted observation that democracies tend not to fight wars with one another even though they are not especially reluctant to fight with autocratic regimes. By looking within states at their domestic politics and institutionally induced behavior, the political economy perspective provides explanations of the democratic peace and associated empirical regularities while offering a cautionary tale for those who leap too easily to the inference that since pairs of democracies tend to interact peacefully; therefore it follows that they have strong normative incentives to promote democratic reform around the world. Rational choices approaches have also helped elucidate new insights that contribute to our understanding of foreign policy. Some of these new insights and the tools of analysis from which they are derived have significantly contributed to the actual decision making process.
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Wolak, Jennifer. Compromise in an Age of Party Polarization. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197510490.001.0001.
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Congressional debates are increasingly defined by gridlock and stalemate, with partisan showdowns that lead to government shutdowns. Compromise in Congress seems hard to reach. But do politicians deserve all the blame? Legislators who resist concessions and stand firm to their convictions might be doing just what voters want them to do. If this is true, however, then citizens must shoulder some of the responsibility for gridlock in Congress. This book challenges this wisdom and argues that Americans value compromise as a way to resolve differences in times of partisan division. Using evidence from a variety of surveys and innovative experiments, the book demonstrates that citizens want more from politics than just ideological representation—they also care about the processes by which disagreements are settled. Americans believe that compromise is a virtuous way to resolve political disputes. Because people’s desire for compromise is deeply rooted in socialized support for democratic values, principled beliefs about compromise can serve as a check on partisan thinking. Across a range of settings, people’s support for compromise persists even when it comes at the cost of partisan goals and policy objectives. People give warmer evaluations to members of Congress who are willing to compromise and view compromise legislation as more legitimate. People care about not just outcomes, but also the way decisions are reached. Winning isn’t everything in politics. People also value the democratic principle of compromise.
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Waylen, Georgina. Democracy, Democratization, and Gender. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.383.
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Democracies and the processes surrounding recent transitions to democracy are gendered in a variety of ways. Recently, feminist scholars have questioned the exclusionary ways in which democracy is both theorized and operationalized and how these have resulted in women and men being incorporated into democratic polities. They have demonstrated how processes of democratization, particularly the third wave of democratization that has taken place over the last three decades, are gendered. They have also shown that women’s movements were key actors in the broad opposition coalitions against many nondemocratic regimes. In order both to understand the differing role of organized women in the subsequent transitions to democracy and the ways in which transition paths affect gender outcomes, feminist scholars have begun to focus on the complex and sometimes contradictory interaction of four variables: the transition; women activists; political parties and politicians involved in the transition; and the institutional legacy of the nondemocratic regime. Two main areas that have been explored in relation to the political outcomes of transitions to democracy are women’s participation in competitive electoral politics and major changes in gender policy. In order to expand one important emerging area of research that is looking at how attempts to establish democracy in post-conflict settings are gendered, feminist scholars with expertise in third wave transitions to democracy need to analyze not only women’s roles in post-conflict institution building but also the ways that the outcomes have gendered implications more systematically.
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Roberts, Kenneth M. Populism, Democracy, and Resistance. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190886172.003.0003.
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Although Donald Trump’s brand of exclusionary right-wing populism finds parallels in Europe and other parts of the world, his presidential election was a singular triumph for this type of populism in a major Western democracy. Societal resistance to Trump’s presidency is heavily conditioned by the grafting of his populist leadership onto the ideological agenda of a Republican Party transformed by the steady infusion of right-wing movement currents into its ranks. In a context of acute partisan polarization and increasingly flagrant transgressions of basic democratic norms and practices, this Resistance is necessarily a multilayered process—that is, it combines mobilization around policy issues with varied forms of “metaresistance” aimed at safeguarding democratic checks and balances.
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Wolf, Christof. Voters and Voting in Context. Edited by Harald Schoen, Sigrid Roßteutscher, Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, and Bernhard Weßels. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198792130.001.0001.
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This book investigates the role of context in affecting political opinion formation and voting behavior. Building on a model of contextual effects on individual-level voter behavior, the chapters of this volume explore contextual effects in Germany in the early twenty-first century. The contributions draw on manifold combinations of individual and contextual information gathered in the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) framework and employ advanced methods. In substantive terms, they investigate the impact of campaign communication on political learning, the effects of media coverage on the perceived importance of political problems, and the role of electoral competition on candidate strategies and perceptions. Other contributions deal with the role of social and economic contexts as well as parties’ policy stances in affecting electoral turnout. The chapters on vote choice explore the impact of social cues on candidate voting, effects of electoral arenas on vote functions, the role of media coverage on ideological voting, and effects of campaign communication on the timing of electoral decision-making. The volume demonstrates the key role of the processes of communication and politicization in bringing about contextual effects. Context thus plays a nuanced role in voting behavior. The contingency of contextual effects suggests that they should become an important topic in research on political behavior and democratic politics.
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Marat, Erica. The Politics of Police Reform. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190861490.001.0001.
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What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force? Across the region, the countries inherited remarkably similar police forces with identical structures, chains of command, and politicized relationships with the political elite. Centralized in control but decentralized in their reach, the police remain one of the least reformed post-communist institutions. As a powerful state organ, the Soviet-style militarized police have resisted change despite democratic transformations in the overall political context, including rounds of competitive elections and growing civil society. This book explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail. Based on the analysis of five post-Soviet countries (Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan) that have officially embarked on police reform efforts, the book examines various pathways to transforming how the state relates to society through policing. It develops a new understanding of both police and police reform. Departing from the conventional interpretation of the police as merely an institution of coercion, this study defines it as a medium for state-society consensus on the limits of the state’s legitimate use of violence. Police are, according to a common Russian saying, a “mirror of society”—serving as a counterweight to its complexity. Police reform, in turn, is a process of consensus-building on the rationale of the use of violence through discussions, debates, media, and advocacy.
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Jones, Kent. Populism and Trade. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190086350.001.0001.
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Populism and Trade traces the role of populist trade policy in the increase of global protectionism and the erosion of international trade institutions. Populist anti-trade rhetoric played a major part in US President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, in which he portrayed current trade agreements as elitist measures to undermine US manufacturing jobs, economic security, and the interests of the American people. Upon taking office he proceeded to implement trade restrictions that were unprecedented in the era of GATT-WTO rules. His use of national security criteria for unilateral tariffs on steel and aluminum and his trade war with China represented an abandonment of WTO trade rules and practices. In the United Kingdom, the 2016 Brexit referendum resulted in a vote to leave the European Union, thereby ending the UK trade integration arrangement that had begun in 1973. The referendum campaign drew on UK criticism of EU intrusion on UK sovereignty in presenting the issue in populist terms of elitist control from Brussels set against the interests of the victimized British people. The book develops a conceptual framework of protectionism that links behavioral factors with perceived external threats and voting behavior based on emotion. It also offers a review of trade policies of other populist governments and an assessment of their economic and institutional cost. A concluding chapter provides recommendations for addressing the populist challenge, focusing on adjustment policies, reforms of global trade institutions, and the need to protect domestic democratic processes.
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Rush Smith, Nicholas. Contradictions of Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190847180.001.0001.
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Despite being one of the world’s most vibrant democracies, vigilantism is regularly practiced in South Africa. In any given year, police estimate between 5 percent and 10 percent of the country’s murders result from vigilante violence—four to five times the percentage from gang violence. Vigilantism is also frequent in other democracies across Latin America, Asia, and Africa. High rates of vigilantism are particularly puzzling in South Africa, though, given that it underwent a celebrated transition to democracy, has a lauded constitution, and enacted massive reforms of the state’s legal institutions following democratization. Contradictions of Democracy asks why vigilantism is prevalent in South Africa, asks what South Africa reveals about vigilantism in other emerging democracies, and uses vigilantism to explore contradictions of democratic state formation generally. Where most scholars explain vigilantism as the result of state or civic failure, the book argues the opposite. Based on nearly twenty months of ethnographic and archival research, it shows vigilantism is a response to processes of democratic state formation—specifically the extension of rights—and thrives in dense civic networks.
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Katz, Richard S., and Peter Mair. The Cartel Party and Populist Opposition. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199586011.003.0007.
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Cartelization has given rise to opposition in the form of anti-party-system or populist parties. While this possibility was clear as early as the 1990s, in the last decade the growth of these parties has led to alarm in some quarters about the continued viability of liberal democratic party government. In contrast to accounts that attribute this rise to the recent policy failures of the political mainstream, this chapter suggests that its roots lie in internal contradictions in the expectations that the parties have raised in the process of cartelization. Rather than being solutions to these problems, models of “the regulatory state” or “consensus democracy” are strikingly similar to democracy under the cartel party model.
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Hagemann, Harald. Ordoliberalism, the Social-Market Economy, and Keynesianism in Germany, 1945–1974. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190676681.003.0004.
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The chapter deals with the development of the welfare state in the first three decades after World War II, in which the West German economy ran through a remarkable catching-up process. Economic policy in the new Federal Republic of Germany in that period was decisively shaped and influenced by the ordoliberal ideas of Walter Eucken and the Freiburg school and the principles of the social-market economy. Whereas Keynesianism of the Hicks-Samuelson neoclassical synthesis had already evolved into the dominant view in the academic sphere during the 1950s, it took until the 1966–67 recession for Keynesianism to find a late (and short) entry into German economic policy with the entry of the Social Democrats into government and their charismatic minister of economics, Karl Schiller.
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Dalton, Russell J. Realignment and Beyond. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198830986.003.0010.
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Affluent democracies have experienced tremendous socio-economic changes since the mid- twentieth century, which has reshaped public opinion, party programs, and electoral choices. This chapter first summarizes the societal changes that have been a driving force behind the political changes described in this study. One pattern involves the longstanding economic issues of contemporary democracies, and shifting social positions on these issues. In addition, an evolving cultural cleavage and its ties to broader attitudes toward social change have altered citizen policy preferences. In most affluent democracies, the parties’ responses to these changing citizen demands have produced a realignment to represent both economic and cultural positions. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for the working of electoral systems and the democratic process more broadly.
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Obydenkova, Anastassia V., and Alexander Libman. Authoritarian Regionalism in the World of International Organizations. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198839040.001.0001.
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The post-Cold War world has witnessed the extensive development of regional international organizations world-wide. The realtionship between their membership and democratization remains a topic of intense scholarly debate. This book opens up a new aspect of the debate by examining regional organization as set up by autocracies (e.g. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia, and China)—referring to them as “non-democratic regional organizations.” How do these newly emerged organizations counteract and confront the democratization process in their own member states and beyond their borders? How and why do the political regimes, the economic development and the cultures of their member states impac the foundation and development of these organizations? What influence do these organizations have on migration, trade, conflicts, and democratization? The book addresses these questions by developing a new theory of authoritarian regionalism. Employing quantitative analysis of authoritarian regionalism world-wide and its historical development since the 1950s, as well as analysing case studies of post-Soviet Eurasia, the book argues that authoritarian regionalism is a new phenomenon in world politics and that modern non-democratic organizations differ from their historical predecessors and that their influence has radically increased in terms of geographic scope and intensity in the last few years. As such, authoritarian regionalism is an important addition to studies of comparative regionalism and the international dimension of authoritarianism. From the policy perspective, non-democratic regional organizations pose a challenge for Western actors in promoting democracy around the world.
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Sadurski, Wojciech. Poland's Constitutional Breakdown. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198840503.001.0001.
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After its double victory in the 2015 presidential and parliamentary elections in Poland, the populist Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS)) party began to dismantle all major checks and balances characteristic of the separation of powers in a democratic state. Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, its regular courts including the Supreme Court, its National Council of the Judiciary, as well as its electoral commissions, civil service, and public media have all been subordinated to the executive and are single-handedly controlled by the party’s leader. In the process, political rights such as the freedom of assembly have been radically restricted, and the party has captured the entire state apparatus. The speed and depth of anti-democratic changes took many observers by surprise, as Poland had been widely regarded as an example of a successful ‘transitional democracy’ in the quarter century preceding 2015. This book attempts to answer three major questions triggered by Poland’s anti-constitutional breakdown: What exactly has happened? Why has it happened? What are the prospects of returning to liberal democracy? Answers to these questions are formulated against the backdrop of current worldwide trends towards populism, authoritarianism, and what is sometimes called ‘illiberal democracy’. However, as this book argues, the Polish variant of ‘illiberal democracy’ is an oxymoron. By undermining the separation of powers, the ruling party concentrates all power in one hand, thus rendering any democratic accountability illusory. There is, however, no inevitability in anti-democratic trends: this book considers a number of possible remedies and sources of hope, including intervention by the European Union.
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Karakoç, Ekrem. Divergent Paths of Inequality in Turkey and Spain. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198826927.003.0005.
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Using most similar design and process-tracing methodology, this chapter investigates the divergent outcomes in income inequality in Turkey and Spain. Even though social-security systems in both countries have been hierarchical, benefiting civil servants, the security apparatus, and workers in key sectors and others in formal sectors at the expense of the rest, they have adopted different social policies over time. This chapter discusses how Turkish governments, with a focus on 1983 to the present time, have designed contributory and noncontributory pensions, healthcare, and other social programs that have affected household income differently. In democratic Spain, however, pension-related policies and unemployment benefits have been dominant forms of social policy, but the Spanish party system has not created major incentives for political parties to utilize these policies in electoral campaigns until recently. This chapter ends with a discussion of how social policies in Turkey and Spain have affected inequality since the two nations transitioned to democracy.
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McConville, Mike, and Luke Marsh. The Myth of Judicial Independence. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198822103.001.0001.
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This book on the criminal justice system is uniquely positioned to examine judicial claims to independence, the politics of the judiciary, the rule of law, and the role of the executive in the context of a democratic polity. The authors have mined the British government’s archival vaults to assemble records including official (previously classified) Home Office files and present a ground-breaking narrative. By tracking the relationship between senior judges and the Home Office from the end of the nineteenth century to the modern day, revelations concerning the politics of the judiciary and the separation of powers are unearthed. The book argues that the claims of the senior judiciary to be independent of the executive are invalidated by historical records and the theory and practice of the separation of powers (the ‘Westminster Model’) deeply flawed. Rather, at every material point, civil servants compromised the role of the senior judiciary’s decision-making. Moreover, with the passive endorsement of senior judges, the executive repeatedly misled Parliament as to the authorship and provenance of fundamental rules governing the relationship of the individual to the state in relation to police powers of arrest, detention, and questioning. The book also explores the past and continuing impact of all this to former colonial territories and traces the close liaison between key members of the senior judiciary and the state in reconfiguring the modern criminal process in a way which weakens defence lawyers, pressurizes defendants into pleading guilty, and undermines cardinal adversarial protections.
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Miller, Lisa L. Making the State Pay. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190203542.003.0008.
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This chapter argues that the literature on the politics of punishment generally, and on US exceptionalism specifically, suffers from insufficient attention to serious violence. It complicates conventional assumptions about democratic politics, mass publics, and crime. Drawing on three cases—the United Kingdom, the United States, and the state of Pennsylvania—this chapter illustrates that rates of violence matter for political attention to crime. It also shows that the politicization of crime does not always lead to a singular focus on punishment and that this politicization in the United States is shaped by both high rates of violence and distinctive institutional dynamics that decouple crime from related social and economic insecurities. The consequence is an (exceptional) political process in the United States that makes it difficult for the polity to make the state pay for high rates of violence and the criminogenic conditions that give rise to them.
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Fishkin, James S. Democracy When the People Are Thinking. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198820291.001.0001.
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Democracy requires a connection to the “will of the people.” What does that mean in a world of “fake news,” relentless advocacy, dialogue mostly among the like-minded, and massive spending to manipulate public opinion? What kind of opinion can the public have under such conditions? What would democracy be like if the people were really thinking in depth about the policies they must live with? This book argues that “deliberative democracy” is not utopian. It is a practical solution to many of democracy’s ills. It can supplement existing institutions with practical reforms. It can apply at all levels of government and for many different kinds of policy choices. This book speaks to a recurring dilemma: listen to the people and get the angry voices of populism or rely on widely distrusted elites and get policies that seem out of touch with the public’s concerns. Instead, there are methods for getting a representative and thoughtful public voice that is really worth listening to. Democracy is under siege in most countries. Democratic institutions have low approval and face a resurgent threat from authoritarian regimes. Deliberative democracy can provide an antidote. It can reinvigorate our democratic politics. This book draws on the author’s research with many collaborators on “Deliberative Polling”—a process he has conducted in twenty-seven countries on six continents. It contributes both to political theory and to the empirical study of public opinion and participation, and should interest anyone concerned about the future of democracy and how it can be revitalized.
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Hetherington, Marc J., and Thomas J. Rudolph. Political Trust and Polarization. Edited by Eric M. Uslaner. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190274801.013.15.
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Trust in government in the United States has become increasingly polarized along partisan lines. Republicans and Democrats are now quite reluctant to trust government when the other party is in power. This chapter explores the sources and consequences of polarized political trust. Analysis of panel data suggests that polarized trust is the result of negative affect toward opposing partisans and a motivated reasoning process in which partisans place greater weight on the evaluative criteria that favor their preferred political party. The chapter further shows that polarized trust has important consequences for individuals’ policy preferences. We explain how the polarization of political trust has contributed to ongoing political dysfunction in Washington. In particular, the results suggest that the polarization of trust encourages party leaders to do what is best for their political party even if it is not best for the larger public interest.
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Mathur, Kuldeep. Recasting Public Administration in India. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199490356.001.0001.
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Ever since a democratic system of government was adopted and a strategy of planned economic development was launched in India, the planners were quite conscious of the need for an administrative system different from the colonial one to implement the planned objective of development. Kuldeep Mathur, in this volume, examines these administrative reforms and provides a magisterial account of the changes in the institutional process of public administration. The introduction of neoliberal policies revived the concerns about reform and change, thereby giving rise to a new vocabulary in the discourse of public administration. The conventional world of public administration was now expected to adopt management practices of the private sector and interact with it to achieve public policy goals. New institutions are now being layered on traditional ones, and India is becoming a recipient of managerial ideas whose efficacy has yet to be tested on Indian soil. In light of the aforementioned changes, this volume argues that hybrid architecture for delivering public goods and services has been the most significant transformation to be institutionalized in the current era and critiques the neoliberal transformation from within a mainstream public administration perspective.
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Hopkin, Jonathan. Anti-System Politics. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190699765.001.0001.
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Recent elections in the advanced Western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges—from both the Left and the Right. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. This book traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the postwar model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s. That shift entailed weakening the democratic process in favor of an opaque, technocratic form of governance that allows voters little opportunity to influence policy. With the financial crisis of the late 2000s, these arrangements became unsustainable, as incumbent politicians were unable to provide solutions to economic hardship. Electorates demanded change, and it had to come from outside the system. Using a comparative approach, the text explains why different kinds of anti-system politics emerge in different countries and how political and economic factors impact the degree of electoral instability that emerges. Finally, it discusses the implications of these changes, arguing that the only way for mainstream political forces to survive is for them to embrace a more activist role for government in protecting societies from economic turbulence.
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Singh, Shane P. Beyond Turnout. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198832928.001.0001.
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Compulsory voting is widely used in the democratic world, and it is well established that it increases electoral participation. This book assesses the effects of compulsory voting beyond turnout. The author first summarizes the normative arguments for and against compulsory voting, provides information on its contemporary use, reviews recent events pertaining to its (proposed) adoption and abolition, and provides an extensive account of extant research on its consequences. The author then advances a theory that compulsory voting polarizes behavior and attitudes, and broadens gaps in political sophistication levels, among those with negative and positive orientations toward democracy. Recognizing the impact of mandatory voting on the electorate, political parties then alter the ways in which they seek votes, with mainstream parties moderating their platforms and smaller parties taking more extreme positions. The author uses survey data from countries with compulsory voting to show that support for the requirement to vote is driven by individuals’ orientations toward democracy. The theory is then comprehensively tested using: cross-national data, cross-cantonal data from Switzerland, and survey data from Argentina. Empirical results are largely indicative of the theorized process whereby compulsory voting has divergent effects on citizens and political parties. The book concludes with a discussion of future directions for academic research, implications for those who craft electoral policy, and alternative ways of boosting turnout.
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Camacho, Alejandro, and Robert Glicksman. Reorganizing Government. NYU Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479829675.001.0001.
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Reorganizing Government seeks to transform how policymakers and scholars understand relationships between government institutions, and offers a pioneering model for constructing and assessing government authority. Regulation is frequently less successful than it could be. This is at least partly because the relationships among regulatory institutions are poorly understood and regulatory structures are routinely poorly designed. The book advances a framework for assessing how governmental authority may be structured along three dimensions-centralization, overlap, and coordination-and demonstrates how differentiating among these dimensions and among particular governmental functions (e.g., standard setting, enforcement) better illuminates the tradeoffs of organizational alternatives. It illustrates these neglected dimensional and functional aspects of interjurisdictional relations through six in-depth explorations involving securities and banking regulation, food safety, environmental protection, and terrorism prevention. In each case study, the authors explore how differentiating among dimensions, and among particular governmental functions, better illuminates the advantages and disadvantages of available structural options. (Re)Organizing Government thus offers a way for officials and scholars to evaluate both adopted and contemplated allocations of authority and to structure intergovernmental authority more effectively. It uses the lens of climate change, an emerging and vital global policy challenge, to illustrate the practical value of applying the book's novel analytical framework to future reorganization efforts. The book concludes by proposing an "adaptive governance" infrastructure that provides a way for policymakers to embed the creation, evaluation, and adjustment of the organization of regulatory institutions into the democratic process itself.