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.

By comparing the importance of representative democracy to the EU as enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty with the political systems in the EU's newest member states, this study explores whether representative democracy can really exist in an enlarged EU and explores the constraints and opportunities for political parties operating the in the EU.

Intellectual traditions are commonly regarded as cultural variations, historical legacies, or path dependencies. By analyzing road junctions between different traditions of Public Administration this book contests the dominant perspective of path-dependent national silos, and highlights the ways in which they are hybrid and open to exogenous ideas. Analyzing the hybridity of administrative traditions from an historical perspective, this book provides a new approach to the history of Public Administration as a scientific discipline. Original and interdisciplinary chapters address the question of how scholars from the U.S., Germany and France mutually influenced each other, from the closing years of the 19th Century, up until the neo-liberal turn of the 1970s. Offering a thorough analysis of the transatlantic history of Public Administration, the conclusion argues that it is vital to learn from the past, in order to make Public Administration more realistic in theory, as well as more successful in practice. Advanced undergraduate and postgraduate political science scholars will find this to be a valuable tool in understanding the foundations of transatlantic Public Administration. This book will also greatly benefit researchers on comparative and transnational history with a keen interest in Public Administration.

The third edition of Media, Politics and Democracy examines the fraught debate over media influence, who wields it and what effect social and traditional media has on what we think, how we behave, and how we vote. Charting the media conglomerates of old, the alarming rise of the Tech Giants in recent decades, concerns over 'fake news', and the use of social media by political candidates, this book places contemporary anxieties into historical context and compares the response to such issues across different states and societies. Using examples from around the world, Street tackles the changing nature of political communications and brings under scrutiny the question of how a democratic society can function alongside a democratic media. Suitable for students studying politics and the media, political communications and other related fields. New to this Edition: - Completely revised and updated version of Mass Media, Politics and Democracy. - Includes a new chapter on the power of the Tech Giants. - Contains detailed accounts of the significance of figures such as Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. - Student questions and issues for debate interspersed throughout the book.

Ideology has been pronounced dead on several occasions in the past. The most recent verdict to this effect has been made in the context of the globalization debate. It proclaims the decline of 'ideological' politics in the fragmented societies of today and especially the irrelevance of established ideological systems and their failure to provide answers to the dilemmas of an increasingly global world.
This popular view is challenged here. On the basis of conceptual and historical analysis applied to a range of major ideological traditions this book argues that no such ideological rupture has in fact occurred. While conceptual shifts are identifiable, changes have occurred within existing ideological configurations and according to their pre-existing logical requirements. Globalization has not destabilized conventional ideologies to an extent that would render them incoherent. On the contrary, they remain meaningful as distinct sets of political beliefs and as such shape the globalization debate.

By most accounts, Italian-style liberalism failed. Explanations of its failure vary from economic backwardness or a political culture shaped by autocracy to claims that liberals ruined their chances by pursuing nothing but narrow middle class interests. This study examines the liberal record to weigh the accuracy of these approaches. Ashley focuses on three controversial issues: public works, social reform, and public order. The railroads would test liberal commitment to laissez-faire, labor laws their pledge to protect all citizens, and dissent their allegiance to individual rights. In each case, liberals compromised their principles. What they decided defined the Italian variant of liberalism by transforming it from a doctrine to concrete practices and political behaviors.

Particularly after 1890, liberals increasingly made empiricism the primary justification for policy and dismissed abstract principles as beneath notice. This shift helps explain why liberalism lost authority and credibility as a set of moral imperatives and as a coherent world view in Italy, as well as why it failed to offer most Italians a compelling alternative to either Socialsim or Fascism. Examining what liberals said and did, however, does not entirely support the despairing judgment of so many historians. Italian liberals managed to build a liberal state and to make it function against intransigent obstacles.

Spanish politics has been transformed. Using new techniques, this book looks at 30 years of Spanish political history to understand party competition, the impact of the EU, media-government relations, aspirations for independence in Catalonia and the Basque region, and the declining role of religion.

This book presents research focusing on the Vietnam Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc dan dang) from 1927 to 1954. It elaborates on the party's establishment, political ideology and organizational structure, the Yen Bai Uprising, the party's downfall, and its role in the Vietnamese Revolution. Findings are presented systematically and comprehensively, relying on official and unofficial, as well as domestic and foreign sources, including texts from localities and hometowns of vital figures in the organization. The author compares, contrasts and evaluates this complex collection of documents based on the theoretical perspectives of conflict theory, social system theory, social structuralism and functionism, dialectic materialism and Marxist theory. It is essential reading for Vietnamese and international researchers interested in Vietnam's political context in the early twentieth century and for undergraduate and postgraduate programs in Vietnam's history and politics.

In The Gun Gap, Mark R. Joslyn advances gun owners as a new classification for understanding political behavior and attitudes. He demonstrates a "gun gap," which captures the differences between gun owners and non-gun owners, and shows how this gap improves conventional behavioral and attitudinal models. The gap represents an important explanation for voter choice, voter turnout, perceptions of personal and public safety, preferences for gun control policies, and support for the death penalty. Moreover, the 2016 presidential election witnessed the largest recorded gun gap in history. The Gun Gap thus affords a new and compelling vantage point to evaluate modern mass politics.

African American candidates for state and federal office in the United States face unique challenges, given the nation's complicated racial dynamics. To date, there have been only two elected African American governors in the country, the first elected in Virginia in 1989 and the second in Massachusetts in 2006. While Black candidates running statewide have been elected in increasing numbers in many areas of the country, there have been fewer successes in the US South. The relative lack of success in the South for Black candidates is puzzling given that, as a percentage of the population, the South has the highest concentration of African American citizens. This book examines the campaigns of Black statewide candidates in the South to untangle the factors that led to their electoral successes as well as the factors that continue to stymie positive electoral results. Looking at broader regional demographic and political trends, the authors project that the South is on the threshold of a major breakthrough for African American statewide candidates, who will have a substantial role in not only fundamentally changing the political dynamics of the region, but the nation as well. This change will be driven not only by Black candidates and voters, but a rising regional coalition of racial minority and white voters who are increasingly willing to vote for Black candidates.

This book offers an analytic history of Britannia (first England and Wales and then Great Britain) over eight hundred years of political turmoil, intermingled with economic stagnation, followed by the engine of the industrial revolution. The book draws on economics, political science, public choice, philosophy and the law to probe in depth into the evolution of Britannia from an impoverished feudal and then post-feudal autocracy into a constitutional monarchy with limited suffrage that provided the fulcrum for industrial and commercial success, making Britannia, by 1884, the richest nation, per capita, on the planet. The book challenges head-on the Whiggist liberal notion of Macaulay and Trevelyan that the path from oppression to freedom was one of unimpeded progress. Among its novel features, the book draws upon the dictator's handbook, as modeled by Bueno de Mesquita and Alistair Smith to evaluate the period of varying autocracy, 1066-1688. The book draws upon modern public choice theory and legal history to evaluate the fragile, corrupt constitutional monarchy that oversaw the initial phase of post-Glorious Revolution Britannia, 1689-1775. At each stage, the philosophical battle between those who sought order and unity and those who sought individual liberty is meticulously outlined. The book draws on the contributions of the Scottish Enlightenment (Hume, Ferguson and Smith) and of classical liberal philosophy (John Stuart Mill) to explain the final vault of Britannia from a weak and corrupt to a robust and admired constitutional monarchy grounded on the rule of law, over the period 1776-1884.

An exploration of the ways that multiple inequalities are being addressed in Europe. Using country-based and region-specific case studies it provides an innovative comparative analysis of the multidimensional equality regimes that are emerging in Europe, and reveals the potential that these have for institutionalizing intersectionality.

Drawing on theories of neo-institutionalism to show how institutions shape dissident behaviour, Boucek develops new ways of measuring factionalism and explains its effects on office tenure. In each of the four cases - from Britain, Canada, Italy and Japan - intra-party dynamics are analyzed through times series and rational choice tools.

This is an analysis of think-tanks in Britain and Germany and their role in the re-making of the British Labour party and Germany's Social Democrats as 'Third Way' parties. The part that think-tanks played in the creation of the the 'workfare state' in the 1990s and 2000s is also explored in this book.

In the first book of its kind, Leo Huberts provides a critical synthesis of cutting-edge research on public sector integrity exploring issues such as the definition and importance of public sector integrity, the various methodological approaches to the field as well as considering the causes of for the violation of values associated with integrity.

This text analyzes the aims, activities and structures of cross border migrant organizations in four European countries of arrival and seven countries of origin, exploring different patterns of cross-border resource mobilization and coordination.

The increased targeting of civilians by militants raises serious and profound questions for policy-makers. Examining conflict in Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, this book focuses on ethno-nationalist militant groups and formulates a model to constrain violence against civilians.

Given the centrality of political parties in modern democracies, most research on these systems either directly address their internal functioning and activities or question their critical role. Political science has moved from describing institutions to the thorough analysis of behavior within these institutions and the interactions between them. The inevitable consequences of the maturing and institutionalization of the discipline of political science in many countries include the forming of sub-fields and specialized research communities. At the same time the number of democracies has vastly increased since the 1980s and although not each attempt at democratization was eventually successful, more heterogeneous systems with some form of party competition exist than ever before. As a consequence, the literature addressing the large issues of party democracy spreads over many research fields and has become difficult to master for individual students of party democracy and party governance. The present volume sets out to review the behavior and larger role of political parties in modern democracies. In so doing the book takes its departure from the idea that the main contribution of political parties to the working of democracy is their role as vehicles of political competition in systems of government. Consequently the focus is not merely in the internal functioning of political parties, but rather their behavior the electoral, legislative, and governmental arenas. Thus several chapters address how political parties perform within the existing institutional frameworks. One more chapter looks at the role of political parties in building and adapting these institutions. Finally, two chapters explicitly address the party contributions to democracy in established and new democracies, respectively.

This volume takes a comparative approach to understand general tendencies in post-Communist transition in Russia and China. Bringing together perspectives from Political Science, Sociology and IR, it analyses three arenas of social change: socio-economic systems, political systems, and foreign policies.

China on the Ground in Latin America tells the story of the fundamental but little-discussed change in the nature of PRC engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean since 2009 as Chinese companies have begun to operate in the region. The book provides an in-depth panorama of Chinese commercial activities across sectors from petroleum, mining and agriculture to manufacturing, construction and other services. The book analyzes how the new physical presence is creating challenges for Chinese businesses from winning projects, to dealing with local laborers, communities, indigenous groups and environmentalists, as well as security challenges to PRC personnel and operations and Chinese immigrant populations. It examines the dilemma of the Chinese government of how to use its growing soft power and other instruments to protect its interests in the region in the context of its insistence on its respect for the internal affairs of its partners as sovereign countries.

With theoretically-rich contributions from an international group of political scientists, historians, and economists, this volume addresses the puzzle of why the Middle East has produced no single dominant and acknowledged regional power, despite contenders such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, and Turkey. Rich, theoretically-engaged case study chapters address a gap in the vibrant international academic discussion on the role of (new) regional powers in global politics. Furtig offers powerful insights into both the unique nature of the Middle East region, with its dispersed power structures and competing centers, and probable new power constellations.

"This is the first book to offer a systematic analysis of human rights in the 21st century. The chapters, written from diverse methodological perspectives, provide rich and varied insights on vital questions concerning the resiliency, weaknesses, and prospects of human rights today"--Provided by publisher.