Who shapes the European Union's policy towards Latin America? How has this EU policy modified individual member states' relations with the region? This book provides a comparative account of seven member states' bilateral links with Latin America since 1945, in the context of their EU membership and based on the concept of 'Europeanization'. It illustrates how and why the main architects of this EU policy have been Spain and Germany. In contrast, Poland, Sweden and Ireland, which had little previous interaction with Latin America, have developed their current relations with that region virtually as a result of their EU membership. The United Kingdom and France lie in the middle: they have been influential in certain policy-areas and key periods in history, while they have adapted to what is done at the EU level in others. Practitioners, established academic experts as well emerging scholars in the field bring to be bear a novel combination of pioneering research and cutting edge conceptual analysis on this important but neglected area of the EU's foreign relations.

Intergovernmental agreements are an important instrument in federal systems, establishing new social programs, regulating agricultural practices, and even changing constitutions. Despite their importance, there have only been limited attempts to understand agreements in a comparative context or to provide a theoretical framework for their study. This book addresses both of these deficiencies by comparing the use of agreements in six federations (Australia, Canada, Germany, South Africa, Switzerland and the United States) and considering why certain federations form more agreements than others. Parker analyzes the data using an institutional framework that considers the effects of seven variables, including the constitutional division of powers, the system of intergovernmental transfers, the size of the welfare state and the nature of governing institutions. In addition, the study provides the first ever comparative database of national intergovernmental agreements - a new resource for future research. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Political Science, Federalism, Government, Political Institutions, Political Theory and Comparative Politics.

Comparative Public Administration 2nd edition provides a clear introduction to the contemporary system of public administration and management in a number of significant countries. This text examines, country-by-country, the extent to which new public management, politicians and public opinion can influence bureaucracies in various countries; in addition, it explores the role of public administration systems within the wider political systems and democratic frameworks of their states. The new edition revises and updates all of the original country studies and adds three more chapters on Poland, India and China. Each chapter is written to a common framework which makes comparison easier and covers the following issues: -Political culture -The constitutional framework -The civil service -Central government agencies -Federal and local government -Financing the system -Coordinating the system -Managing the system -Accountability, secrecy and openness -Democracy and the administrative system -Further developments and issues with the system A wide number of countries are covered, including: the United States, the European Union, China, France, UK, Germany, the Republic of Ireland, Italy, India and Poland. This textbook is essential reading for students of comparative public administration.

Reforming the Administration of Justice in Mexico examines the challenges Mexico faces in reforming the administration of its justice system, which Cornelius sees as critical for the consolidation of democracy, the well-being of Mexican citizens, and successful U.S.-Mexican relations. . . . In addition, the book presents sources of empirical data, case studies evaluating state and local level challenges, and analyses of best practices. Contributors: David A. Shirk, Alejandra Rios Cazares, Robert Buffington, Pablo Piccato, Elena Azaola, Marcelo Bergman, Benjamin Nelson Reames, Guillermo Zepeda Lecuona, Sigrid Arzt, Carlos Silva, Sara Schatz, Hugo Concha, Ana Laura Magaloni Kerpel, Elisa Speckman Guerra, Hector Fix-Fierro, Jeffrey K. Staton, Robert M. Kossick, Jr., Ruben Minutti Z., Pablo Paras, Kathleen Staudt, Irasema Coronado, Rosalva Aida Hernandez, Hector Ortiz Elizondo, Robert O. Varenik, Mario Arroyo Juarez, Allison Rowland, Marcos Pablo Moloeznik, John J. Bailey, and Wayne A. Cornelius.

Leading governance theorist Jonathan S. Davies develops a rich comparative analysis of austerity governance and resistance in eight cities, to establish a conjunctural perspective on the rolling crises of neoliberal globalism. Drawing on a major international study of eight cities, Davies employs Gramscian regime analysis to consider the consolidation, weakening and transformation of urban governance regimes through the age of austerity. He explores how urban governance shapes variations in austere neoliberalism, tackling themes including collaboration, dominance, resistance and counter-hegemony. The book is a significant addition to thinking about how the era of austerity politics influences urban governance today, and the potential for alternative urban futures.

Principles of Comparative Politics offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to comparative inquiry, research, and scholarship. In this thoroughly revised Third Edition, students now have an even better guide to cross-national comparison and why it matters. The new edition retains a focus on the enduring questions with which scholars grapple, the issues about which consensus has started to emerge, and the tools comparativists use to get at the complex problems in the field. Updates to this edition include a new intuitive take on statistical analyses and a clearer explanation of how to interpret regression results; a thoroughly-revised chapter on culture and democracy that includes a more extensive discussion of cultural modernization theory and a new overview of survey methods for addressing sensitive topics; and a revised chapter on dictatorships that incorporates a principal-agent framework for understanding authoritarian institutions. Examples from the gender and politics literature have been incorporated into various chapters, and empirical examples and data on various types of institutions have been updated. The authors have thoughtfully streamlined chapters to better focus attention on key topics. Explore online resources: https://edge.sagepub.com/principlescp3e

The Legacy of Eric Williams provides an indispensable and significant understanding of Eric Williams's contributions to the now independent nation of Trinidad and Tobago and his impact on the broader international understanding of the Caribbean. This book stands out because of its simultaneous investigation into Eric Williams as a scholar/intellectual, a political leader, and, most importantly, a key postcolonial figure. Most previous studies have treated these as separate arenas. The essays here confront the relevance of postcolonialism in understanding Williams's role both in post-independence Trinidad and Tobago and in newer understandings of Caribbean globalization. The volume divides into three broad sections--""Becoming Eric Williams,"" ""Political Williams,"" and ""Textual Williams."" ""Becoming Eric Williams"" provides background on Williams and the Caribbean's ontological quest, addressing what it means to be West Indian and Caribbean. ""Political Williams"" engages with his policies and their consequences, describing the impact of Williams's political policies on several areas: integration, color stratification, and labor and public sector reform. Williams's far-reaching political influence in these aspects cements his legacy as one of the main public intellectuals responsible for creating the modern Caribbean. ""Textual Williams"" examines his scholarly contributions from a more traditional academic perspective. These sections allow for a comprehensive understanding of Williams as a man, a scholar, and a politician.

Politics and Government in South Africa introduces readers to all aspects of government and politics in South Africa, from local, to provincial, national, and on to international considerations.

The perfect guide for students and general readers, this textbook explains how South Africa’s key institutions are governed and interact with each other, and how important issues such as economics, gender, race, and class shape relations between citizens and government. Grounded in history and leading theories and debates, the book also brings in alternative perspectives from artists, writers, and popular culture, to demonstrate the diverse ways in which issues of politics and social justice are engaged with within South Africa.

Written with the needs of students at the forefront, each chapter includes:

• Review and discussion questions
• Key terms and further resources
• Fun facts in a Did you know? section
• Supplementary sources and quotations in a The Past as Present section

Interactive and engaging, Politics and Government in South Africa invites readers to consider what they would do in tackling issues such as land distribution, peacekeeping, South Africa’s role in the African Union, and military engagement abroad. It is an essential read for undergraduate students studying Political Science, International Relations, and African Studies, and for anyone looking to develop a deeper understanding of South Africa.

When polling data showed that an overwhelming 81% of white evangelicals had voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, commentators across the political spectrum were left aghast. Even for a community that had been tracking further and further right for decades, this support seemed decidedly out of step. How, after all, could an amoral, twice-divorced businessman from New York garner such devoted admiration from the most vociferous of "values voters?" That this same group had, not a century earlier, rallied national support for such progressive causes as a federal minimum wage, child labor laws, and civil rights made the Trump shift even harder to square. In The End of Empathy, John W. Compton presents a nuanced portrait of the changing values of evangelical voters over the course of the last century. To explain the rise of white Protestant social concern in the latter part of the nineteenth century and its sudden demise at the end of the twentieth, Compton argues that religious conviction, by itself, is rarely sufficient to motivate empathetic political behavior. When believers do act empathetically-championing reforms that transfer resources or political influence to less privileged groups within society, for example-it is typically because strong religious institutions have compelled them to do so. Citizens throughout the previous century had sought membership in churches as a means of ensuring upward mobility, but a deterioration of mainline Protestant authority that started in the 1960s led large groups of white suburbanites to shift away from the mainline Protestant churches. There to pick up the slack were larger evangelical congregations with conservative leaders who discouraged attempts by the government to promote a more equitable distribution of wealth and political authority. That shift, Compton argues, explains the larger revolution in white Protestantism that brought us to this political moment.

Among the violent acts perpetrated by radical Islamist groups in Europe, the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris has been one of those that has challenged established categories of public debate the most. Through a multifaceted and detailed analysis of the public discourse around the Charlie Hebdo episode in France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, Discursive Turns and Critical Junctures offers an in-depth analysis of how political groups and religious organizations have reacted to the event, which claims they have made in the public sphere, and how they have justified such claims. Drawing on newspaper sources and discourse analysis, the authors navigate the complexities caused by political violence. They develop a threefold comparison that considers how the debate differs across countries; how it evolved over time; and how it varies when one looks at mainstream media compared to social movement arenas. Based on a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative analyses, the volume pays particular attention to radical left, radical right and religious actors and to issues related to migration and integration, secularism and cultural diversity, security and civil rights. In particular, they focus on the way in which transformative events act as critical junctures within different public spheres. Starting from the nefarious attacks on January 2015, this highly relevant, theoretically compelling, and methodologically sophisticated study of public debates in Europe adds substantially to the growing body of research into critical junctures as discursive turning points and gives insights into into a number of debates ranging including citizenship and political violence.

In the 1920s and the 1930s, Turkey, Iran and Russia vehemently pursued state-secularizing reforms, but adopted different strategies in doing so. But why do states follow different secularizing strategies? The literature has already shattered the illusion that secularization of the state has been a unilinear, homogeneous and universal process, and has convincingly shown that secularization of the state has unfolded along different paths. Much, however, remains to be uncovered. This book provides an in-depth comparative historical analysis of state secularization in three major Eurasian countries: Turkey, Iran and Russia. To capture the aforementioned variation in state secularization across three countries that have been hitherto analyzed as separate studies, Birol Baskan adopts three modes of state secularization: accommodationism, separationism and eradicationism. Focusing thematically on the changing relations between the state and religious institutions, Baskan brings together a host of factors, historical, strategic and structural, to account for why Turkey adopted accommodationism, Iran separationism and Russia eradicationism. In doing so, he expertly demonstrates that each secularization strategy was a rational response to the strategic context the reformers found themselves in.

Comparative Perspectives on Environmental Policies and Issues presents tools and concepts about environmental policies in several developed and developing countries. It explores a broad survey of ecological modernization theory, ecological feminism theory, environmental justice theory, the concept of sustainability, and research on environmental policies. Data were collected through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, and are used to analyze social, economic, and environmental impact on people. The book specifically discusses how the earth's basic life-supporting capital (soils, forests, species, fresh water and oceans) is degraded or depleted to provide for human needs, and how air pollution and acid precipitation, are causing widespread injury to humans, forests, and crops. Realistically, over-taxing of natural resources and ecological systems throughout the world has promoted economic growth and created increasing opportunities for people while also advancing social injustice. The use of the environment to accomplish social and economic transformation raises fundamental issues for the study of environmental policy and the natural ecological system. As human beings exploit the natural environment to meet present needs, they often will destroy resources needed for the future generations. Thus, environmental policies are enacted to ensure that social and economic impacts of the environment are compatible with the limits of natural systems. Offering an intuitive and crystal-clear explanation of the key concepts and principles of environmental policies and sustainable development, this volume is suitable not only for environmental science students, but also for instructors, practitioners, researchers, and academics.

Why has democracy failed to take root in Russia? After shedding the shackles of Soviet rule, some countries in the postcommunist region undertook lasting democratization. Yet Russia did not. Russia experienced dramatic political breakthroughs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it subsequently failed to maintain progress toward democracy. In this book, M. Steven Fish offers an explanation for the direction of regime change in post-Soviet Russia. Relying on cross-national comparative analysis as well as on in-depth field research in Russia, Fish shows that Russia's failure to democratize has three causes: too much economic reliance on oil, too little economic liberalization, and too weak a national legislature. Fish's explanation challenges others that have attributed Russia's political travails to history, political culture, or to 'shock therapy' in economic policy. The book offers a theoretically original and empirically rigorous explanation for one of the most pressing political problems of our time.

Based on the author s 39 years of teaching environmental policy, working in Washington, and traveling, Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries offers a complete primer in environmental dilemmas and policies from a comparative perspective. The book covers 16 countries according to five themes: participation, interest groups, political parties, governmental structures, and the diplomatic agenda. The author has visited all of the 16 countries and offers original insights on the dynamics of their policies.
The author balances theory and practical solutions, comparing policies, highlighting successes and failures, and suggesting best practices. He looks for common features such as the Environmental Decade or response to the Kyoto Protocol. He finds many cases of diffusion such as the impact of Rachel Carson or Jacques Cousteau. The analysis ranges from advanced industrial countries to developing ones. The tone is positive, with facts and ideas conveyed through vignettes Each chapter concludes with highlights of what that country received from others, such as the popularity of Carson s book or Cousteau s films, and innovations, such as the idea of a national park or of a green political party.
From the theoretical perspective, comparing environmental issues can illuminate other policy areas. Over all, the book demonstrates rapid diffusion among the Western democracies, and slower diffusion to Russia and China. "

In 1995 none of the political parties representing the peoples of Bosnia preferred a federal option. Yet, Bosnia became a federal state, highly decentralised and with a complex institutional architecture. This solution was imposed on them by international actors as a result of peace negotiations following the Yugoslav wars. Political parties in post-war Bosnia were not willing to identify with or accept the federation. The international community intervened taking over key decisions and so Bosnia and Herzegovina became the first state to experience a new model of federalism, namely 'imposed federalism' and a new model of a federal state, that of the 'internationally administered federation'. By combining comparative politics, conflict analysis and international relations theory Soeren Keil offers a unique analysis of federalism in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina. By exploring this model of 'imposed federalism' not only does this study greatly contribute to the literature on developments in Bosnia and Herzegovina it also re-evaluates comparative federalism in theory and practice. This study also offers important conclusions for similar cases, both in the Western Balkans region and the wider world, where international involvement and federalism as a method of conflict resolution in diverse societies becomes ever more prevalent and important.

In today's precarious world, working people's experiences are strangely becoming more alike even as their disparities sharpen. The Fight for Time explores the logic behind this paradox by listening to what Latino day laborers say about work and society. The book shows how migrant laborers are both exception and synecdoche in relation to the precarious conditions of contemporary work life. As unauthorized migrants, these workers are subjected to extraordinarily harsh treatment - yet in startling ways, they also epitomize struggles that apply throughout the economy. Juxtaposing day laborers' descriptions of their desperate circumstances and dangerous work with theoretical accounts of the forces fueling insecurity, The Fight for Time illuminates the temporal contradictions that define precarity today. The book taps the core intellectual current among day labor groups - Paulo Freire's popular-education theory - to craft an original "critical-popular" approach for understanding the points of connection between the ways that day laborers view their lives and scholarly analysis of precarious work-life writ large. The result is a temporally attuned and politically bracing perspective on neoliberal crises, the work ethic in the era of affective and digital labor, the intensifying racial governance of public spaces, the burgeoning deportation regime, and the growth of occupational safety and health hazards. The accounts of the day laborers in this book are rich with potential to catalyze social critique among migrant workers - and clarify the terms on which mass-scale opposition to precarity can occur. Such opposition would demand restoration of workers' stolen time, engage in a fight for the city, challenge the conditions under which aversion to financial risk puts workers into physical danger, and foment the refusal of work. We can look to the urban worker centers where this radically democratic politics of precarity is taking root to understand what types of organizations have the potential to wage the fight for time and enable broad mobilization in the face of precarity: worker centers for all working people.

This book explores the ways in which political parties, in contemporary parliamentary democracies, choose their leaders and then subsequently hold them accountable. The authors provide a comprehensive examination of party leadership selection and accountability both through examination of parties and countries in different institutional settings and through a holistic analysis of the role of party leaders and the methods through which they assume, and exit, the office. The collection includes essays on Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Norway and the United Kingdom which have important differences in their party systems, their degree of democratization, the role assigned to party leaders and their methods of leadership selection. Each country examination provides significant data relating to party rules and norms of leadership selection, leadership tenures and leadership contests. The book concludes with a chapter that merges the country data analyses to provide a truly comparative examination of the theoretical questions underlying the volume. This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of legislative studies, elections, democracy, political parties, party systems, political elites and comparative politics.

Linking Citizens and Parties addresses familiar questions about political representation: Are parties responsive to their core supporters or to the public in general? Do parties that adopt centrist policy positions benefit in elections? Does proportional representation encourage party extremism? These fundamental questions about democracy are paired with the empirical observation of Western European democracies during the last thirty years. The study highlights the pathways (mainstream and niche) through which citizens' political preferences are expressed by their political parties. It concludes with a positive evaluation of these democracies as their citizens have access to at least one, and possibly both niche and mainstream pathways.

This study demonstrates that in a time of massive change characterized by the emergence of entirely new political systems and a fundamental reorganization of economic life, systematic patterns of economic conditions affecting election results at the aggregate level can in fact be identified during the first decade of post-communist elections in five post-communist countries: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. A variety of theoretical arguments concerning the conditions in which these effects are more or less likely to be present are also proposed and tested. Analysis is conducted using an original data set of regional level economic, demographic, and electoral indicators, and features both broadly based comparative assessments of the findings across all twenty elections as well as more focused case study analyses of pairs of individual elections.

The first comprehensive map of the social safety net, public and private, in the United States. Societies are often judged by how they treat their most vulnerable members: the poor and near poor. In the United States, this responsibility belongs not only to governments, but also to charities, businesses, individuals, and family members. Their combined efforts generate a social safety net. In Who Cares, Christopher Howard offers the first comprehensive map of the US social safety net. He chronicles how different parts of American society talk about poverty-related needs. And he shows what Americans do to provide basic levels of income, food, housing, medical care, and daily care. Although the US social safety net is extensive, major gaps remain, particularly impacting Blacks, Hispanics, and individuals who are not employed full-time. Drawing heavily upon evidence from the years right before the Covid-19 pandemic, Howard demonstrates that these problems persist even when the economy seems healthy. Who Cares concludes with an initial assessment of how the social safety net performed during the pandemic.

Legislators are entrusted with key parliamentary functions and are important figures in the decision-making process. Their behaviour as political elites is as much responsible for the failures and successes of the new democracies as their institutional designs and constitutional reforms. This book provides a comparative examination of representative elites and their role in democratic development in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It argues that as the drivers of the transformation process in CEE, individual and collective parliamentary actors matter. The authors provide an in-depth analysis of representatives from eleven national parliaments and explore country-specific features of recruitment and representation. They draw on an integrated dataset of parliamentary elites for individual, party family, and parliamentary variables over the 20 years following the collapse of Communism and develop a common framework for the analysis of variations in democratisation and political professionalisation between parliaments and political parties/party families across CEE. This unique volume will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, elite research, post-communist politics, democratisation, legislative studies, and parliamentary representation.

Social Media in Disaster Response focuses on how emerging social web tools provide researchers and practitioners with new opportunities to address disaster communication and information design for participatory cultures. Both groups, however, currently lack research toolkits for tracing participant networks across systems; there is little understanding of how to design not just for individual social web sites, but how to design across multiple systems. Given the volatile political and ecological climate we are currently living in, the practicality of understanding how people communicate during disasters is important both for those researching solutions and for those putting that research into practice. Social Media in Disaster Response addresses this situation by presenting the results of a large-scale sociotechnical usability study on crisis communication in the vernacular related to recent natural and human-made crisis; this is an analysis of the way social web applications are transformed, by participants, into a critical information infrastructure in moments of crisis. This book provides researchers with methods, tools, and examples for researching and analyzing these communication systems while providing practitioners with design methods and information about these participatory communities to assist them in influencing the design and structure of these communication systems.

Media, Religion and Gender presents a selection of eminent current scholarship that explores the role gender plays when religion, media use and values in contemporary society interact. The book: surveys the development of research on media, religion and culture through the lens of key theoretical and methodological issues and debates within gender studies. includes case studies drawn from a variety of countries and contexts to illustrate the range of issues, theoretical perspectives and empirical material involved in current work outlines new areas and reflects on challenges for the future. Students of media, religion and gender at advanced level will find this a valuable resource, as will scholars and researchers working in this important and growing field.

Despite being one of the world's most vibrant democracies, police estimate between five and ten percent of the murders in South Africa result from vigilante violence. This is puzzling given the country's celebrated transition to democracy and massive reform of the state's legal institutions. Where most studies explain vigilantism as a response to state or civic failure, in Contradictions of Democracy, Nicholas Rush Smith illustrates that vigilantism is actually a response to the processes of democratic state formation. In the context of densely networked neighborhoods, vigilante citizens often interpret the technical success of legal institutions-for instance, the arrest and subsequent release of suspects on bail-as failure and work to correct such perceived failures on their own. Smith also shows that vigilantism provides a new lens through which to understand democratic state formation. Among young men of color in some parts of South Africa, fear of extra-judicial police violence is common. Amid such fear, instead of the state seeming protective, it can appear as something akin to a massive vigilante organization. An insightful look into the high rates of vigilantism in South Africa and the general challenges of democratic state building, Contradictions of Democracy explores fundamental questions about political order, the rule of law, and democratic citizenship.

This book explores and presents the influence of contextual factors on the choice of electoral systems for parliamentary elections in both democracies and non-democracies around the world. Taking a macroscopic approach, the author focuses on structural explanations, with an emphasis on general patterns rather than country specific explanations. Drawn from a wealth of data, the book presents the frequency of the adoption of each electoral formula and system in the postwar era and is followed by a theoretical elaboration of electoral system choice. The author then draws on rational, cultural/historical and institutional theories which are systematically analyzed by means of sophisticated bivariate and multivariate techniques. Lundell demonstrates that few electoral systems have been chosen from rational considerations and the impact of the cultural and historical setting is tremendous; colonial legacy, regional influence and temporal trends largely explain the cross-national variation in electoral systems. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, electoral politics and comparative politics.