Democracy in Southeast Asia seems to be in crisis. The contributors to this volume argue that this is a crisis of democratic governance. They look into its causes, consequences and prospects, comparing themes of democratic governance in Southeast Asia such as political culture, civil society, political parties and institutions and human rights

This book is concerned with a large question in one small, but highly problematic case: how can a prime minister establish control and coordination across his or her government? The Greek system of government sustains a 'paradox of power' at its very core. The Constitution provides the prime minister with extensive and often unchecked powers. Yet, the operational structures, processes and resources around the prime minister undermine their power to manage the government. Through a study of all main premierships between 1974 and 2009, Prime Ministers in Greece argues that the Greek prime minister has been 'an emperor without clothes'. The costs of this paradox included the inability to achieve key policy objectives under successive governments and a fragmented system of governance that provided the backdrop to Greece's economic meltdown in 2010. Building on an unprecedented range of interviews and archival material, Featherstone and Papadimitriou set out to explore how this paradox has been sustained. They conclude with the Greek system meeting its 'nemesis': the arrival of the close supervision of its government by the 'Troika' - the representatives of Greece's creditors. The debt crisis challenged taboos and forced a self-reflection. It remains unclear, however, whether either the external strategy or the domestic response is likely to be sufficient to make the Greek system of governance 'fit for purpose'.

How do collective actors move from moderate politics to (violent) extremism? Faced with high risks of repression and implosion, they need to legitimate such radical change to keep members and followers committed to collective action. Drawing on the texts, audios, and videos of five Islamist organisations in the UK and Germany in the 2000s and 2010s, the book develops a transdisciplinary theoretical framework and innovative methodological approach to explore how radical changes in activism are mediated. Clément argues that political violence has to feel right, as a collective, for an organisation and its followers to move from moderate activism to (violent) extremism. She shows that organisations mediate this change by performing collective emotions in and through narrative. The book offers a provocative and nuanced account which departs from conventional interpretations of radicalisation and reminds us of the power of emotions. -- .

A novel and powerful explanation of the social roots of American politics and the powerful forces in the background. The usual approach to political conflict is to look at policy battles inside government, then trace them back to political parties and organized interests. Yet, in The Social Roots of American Politics, Regina L. Wagner and Byron E. Shafer begin at the opposite end of the causal chain by looking at the social roots of American political conflict, how these roots produce differing policy preferences in the general public, and how those preferences get transmitted into American government. Drawing from over a half-century of public surveys of American voters, they demonstrate that class, race, religion, and gender provide the roots of these conflicts across the four primary domains of policy conflict: social welfare, civil rights, foreign affairs, and cultural values. They also factor in how regional differences affect partisan attachment, focusing on the South in particular. By turning the focus to deep-rooted social cleavages, this book provides a novel and powerful explanation of the basic forces that shape the contours of conflict in American politics.

Transformation of Education Policy deals with internalization processes in education policy and their impact on national policy making. It investigates national responses to the PISA study for secondary education and the Bologna study for tertiary education. Five in depth country case studies are included.

This comprehensive textbook applies economic analysis to public law. The economic analysis of law has revolutionized legal scholarship and teaching in the last half-century, but it has focused mostly on private law, business law, and criminal law. This book extends the analysis to fundamental topics in public law, such as the separation of government powers, regulation by agencies, constitutional rights, and elections. Every public law involves six fundamental processes of government: bargaining, voting, entrenching, delegating, adjudicating, and enforcing. The book devotes two chapters to each process, beginning with the economic theory and then applying the theory to a wide range of puzzles and problems in law. Each chapter concentrates on cases and legal doctrine, showing the relevance of economics to the work of lawyers and judges. Featuring lucid, accessible writing and engaging examples, the book addresses enduring topics in public law as well as modern controversies, including gerrymandering, voter identification laws, and qualified immunity for police.

Since their independence in 1991, the former Soviet Republics have gone through difficult transition processes to achieve cultural, economical and political transformations. Diverse internal dynamics have produced diverse outcomes for the countries and peoples of the former Soviet space. While there are different results of transition, there are also similarities due to many common concerns and expectations. The most important question is, What have these new states transformed into where democracy, free market, and functioning civil society are concerned? Or, Has the transformation led to greater polarisation in terms of rich and poor divide, authoritarianism and withdrawal of the state from providing social security, contested geopolitics and increasing external influence? Apart from discussing the challenges that the post-Soviet states face and their coping strategies, the articles in this book also look at how the Eurasian countries participate in the globalisation process while using the energy and natural resources to their benefit.

An investigation of recent developments and trends within the Yugoslav successor states since the signing of the Dayton Agreements in Autumn 1995. This book offers a distinctive and desirable perspective on the seven successor states, their cultures, politics and identities by providing an internal perspective on the region and its developments.

An in-depth account of why countries' treacherous foreign policies often have harmless origins, how this predicament shapes international politics, and what to do about it. The increasing unpredictability of state behavior in recent world politics is a surprising development. The uncertainty that results intensifies conflict and stymies trust. In Volatile States in International Politics, Eleonora Mattiacci offers the first account of this issue that investigates which states have been volatile and why. Leveraging statistical techniques and archival data in a probing analysis of rivals and allies since the end of World War II, she rejects attempts at dismissing volatility as reflecting mercurial leaders or intractable issues. Instead, Mattiacci explains that a state acts in a volatile manner when its clashing domestic interests leverage power to achieve their goals on the international arena. In demonstrating states' potential for volatile behaviors, she asks us to reconsider how much we really know about change and instability in international politics. When properly understood, she shows, volatile behavior can become less confusing for observers and potentially less dangerous. This book offers novel, evidence-based tools to cope with volatility in the global arena.

While demagoguery is traditionally regarded as destabilizing and dangerous, this book shows how it can also be used to advance the common good. Most of us think that demagoguery is, by definition, bad. Relatedly, scholars almost invariably treat demagoguery as a divisive practice that appeals to what is worst in an audience at the expense of what is best for the public good. In Demagogues in American Politics, Charles U. Zug offers a historical analysis of the role of demagoguery in the American political system. Challenging the conventional wisdom, he argues that demagoguery is not an inherently bad form of leadership. Whereas classical thinkers had believed that demagoguery was always a threat to political order, the most sophisticated founders of the American Constitution-inspired by Enlightenment political philosophy-recognized that demagoguery, though dangerous, could be recruited by the Constitution to improve the political system. Through case studies drawn from the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, this book argues that demagogic leadership can be deployed by public officials to advance the aspirations of constitutional democracy.

This book presents the experiences of eleven European countries in the field of territorial reforms. Based on case-studies that outline the basic features of the politics of territorial choice in the respective countries, the focus is on national policies, politics, and cleavages; the strategies employed and the outcomes of the reforms.

The people who live in border towns often have closer relations with people across their immediate borders than with people in the same country as them. Despite how intertwined these border communities often are, neither community can access the governmental institutions of the nation on the other side. Why are the citizens of neighboring regions that lie across an international border often subject to very different governance systems? More broadly, why can't public services be bought piecemeal, on an a-la-carte basis, with governments competing to provide higher quality services at the lowest cost in a marketplace for government services? These questions lie at the heart of modern International Relations. In The Cartel System of States, Avidit Acharya and Alexander Lee provide a powerful and field-shaping theory to address a fundamental issue in world politics: the character of the territorial nation-state. They contend that the modern territorial state system works as an economic cartel in which states have local, bounded monopolies in governing their citizens. States refuse to violate each other's monopolies, even when they could do so easily. Acharya and Lee examine what makes this system stable, when and how it emerged, how it spread, how it has been challenged, and what led it to be so resilient over time. Drawing from the centuries long process of modern state formation, The Cartel System of States explains both how the present system of territorial states-by no means a foregone conclusion in retrospect-took over the world and how it might change in the future.

In Building Theory in Political Communication, Gadi Wolfsfeld, Tamir Sheafer, and Scott Althaus present the first generalizable conceptual framework for political communication that is also falsifiable, explaining how media performance contributes to successful political performance across nations, regime types, and information systems. The book identifies three tensions in the current literature that have thus far prevented a general theory of political communication. The first is a vague understanding of what it means for media to exercise independence from politics. The second is a focus on media in wealthy, Western, and democratic countries. The third is a tendency to build interpretive frameworks that pose as theories, but that cannot be tested. To address these three tensions, this book adapts, refines, and extends the Politics-Media-Politics (PMP) principle, which states that variations in political ecosystems have a major impact on media systems, values, practices, and resources, which can then have dependent, independent, and conditional effects on political processes. With an emphasis on international comparative studies encompassing diverse political systems, the authors move beyond the field's Western focus to show that PMP is useful in a wide range of contexts and subfields. A sophisticated and timely intervention in the field of political communication, this volume presents the PMP principle to help political communication researchers adopt a broader perspective when attempting to ascertain the roles that communication plays in political processes.

A comparative exploration of Western and Chinese understandings of justice and their possible use to reframe Sino-American relations and international governance. The concept of justice is central to politics: it justifies the ordering of society and the distribution of rewards. In Justice and International Order, Richard Ned Lebow and Feng Zhang compare and contrast Western and Chinese conceptions of justice. They argue that justice can almost invariably be reduced to the principles of fairness and equality, although they are developed and expressed differently in the two cultures. Lebow and Zhang show that there has been a noticeable shift in both in favoring equality over fairness in the modern era. They analyze the growing conflict between China and the West in the light of these conceptions of justice and show how they might be deployed to ameliorate it. The authors also offer a critique of what passes for global order and explore ways in which fairness and equality, and trade-offs between them, offer pathways to better and more peaceful worlds.

Through a range of international case studies from the USA, UK, France, Germany and Italy, this text assesses the conditions necessary for effective leadership and emphasizes the part played by uncertainty and division amongst followers.

"Party Politics in Germany" is the only English-language study of its kind and examines the phenomenon of party politics in the Federal Republic through comparison across time and space. It draws upon new data from the 2002 Federal elections and recent Land elections, as well as on a far more explicitly comparative literature than is generally found in single-country studies. The book not only sheds new light on political phenomena in Germany but also allows students of the comparative method to apply some of the key concepts, models and approaches with which they are familiar to the rich context of a single country study.

Recent years have witnessed widespread changes in state voting and registration laws. These include same day registration, automatic voter registration, early voting, mail voting, and no-excuse absentee voting where people mail in their ballots. Most research on these voting reforms has downplayed their effects, showing that they generally benefit educated, older, and more affluent people. This book shows the positive effects that these reforms have on overall voter turnout, and among voters of disadvantaged groups. Specifically, it emphasizes the ways that state governments are making it easier to participate in elections in an effort to strengthen democratic government. In Accessible Elections, Michael Ritter and Caroline J. Tolbert explore the wide variation from state to state in convenience voting methods and provide new empirical analysis of the beneficial effects of these policies, not only in boosting participation rates overall, but in increasing voter turnout for disadvantaged groups. The authors measure both convenience methods and implementation of the laws, and explore how elections are conducted across the fifty states, where average turnout has varied more than 25 percentage points over the past four decades. The authors also draw on national voter files with millions of cases and vote histories of the same individuals over time in order to show the real effects of election reform and to make a case for how state governments can modernize their electoral practices, increase voter turnout, and make the experience of voting more accessible and equitable. Ritter and Tolbert assert that in the wake of covid-19 and efforts to maintain social distancing, early voting and absentee/mail voting are of particular importance to avoid election-day crowds and ensure equitable elections in states with large populations. With important implications for the 2020 general election and beyond, Accessible Elections underscores how state governments can modernize their electoral procedures to increase voter turnout, address inequalities, and influence campaign and party mobilization strategies.

In recent years, lifelong learning has become one of the most prominent education policy goals. This book shows how international organizations have promoted this idea and disseminated the need for it to countries all over the world. As a consequence of their activity, lifelong learning has become a central element of modern education policy.This book analyzes the global spread of lifelong learning policies since the 1970s, emphasizing the role of international organizations.

Through a comparative case study analysis of the United Kingdom and Germany, with references to the United States, this study examines the impetuses for and processes by which governments came to choose the points system for immigration control.

This book is about the mundane, local, every day practices that constitutes democracy. It defines politicization as the key process in understanding democracy in different cultural contexts throughstudies ofFrance and Finland. By means of comparative ethnographic, media, and visual analysis that focuseson how democracy is actually practiced in different contexts, thiswork sets outa more nuanced and controversial picture of two opposite models of European politics. The familiar juxtaposition of Southern and Northern political cultures is set in a new perspective through comparative analyses of politicizations: the processes of opening political arenas and recognizing controversy.The book explores the ways in which people in different contexts deliberate, resist, and politicize, and hence practice, challenge, and transform democracy in ways that are of relevance to all political systems.

This book explores the transformation of employment relations, the rise of the worker protest and the reform of trade union practice to ask how successfully the state-socialist trade unions have adapted to their new role of representing the rights and interests of workers.

A timely look into and argument for the Jeffersonian Electoral College. The Electoral College that governs America has been with us since 1804, when Thomas Jefferson's supporters redesigned it for his re-election. The Jeffersonians were motivated by the principle of majority rule. Gone were the days when a president would be elected by acclamation, as George Washington had been. Instead, given the emergence of intense two-party competition, the Jeffersonians wanted to make sure that the Electoral College awarded the presidency to the candidate of the majority, rather than minority, party. They also envisioned that a candidate would win by amassing a majority of Electoral College votes secured from states where the candidate's party was in the majority. For most of American history, this system has worked as intended, producing presidents who won Electoral College victories derived from state-based majorities. In the last quarter-century, however, there have been three significant aberrations from the Jeffersonian design: 1992, 2000, and 2016. In each of these years, the Electoral College victory depended on states where the winner received only a minority of votes. In this authoritative history of the American Electoral College system, Edward Foley analyzes the consequences of the unparalleled departure from the Jeffersonians' original intent-and delineates what we can do about it. He explains how states, by simply changing their Electoral College procedures, could restore the original Jeffersonian commitment to majority rule. There are various ways to do this, all of which comply with the Constitution. If only a few states had done so before 2016, the outcome might have been different. Doing so before future elections can prevent another victory that, contrary to the original Jeffersonian intent, a majority of voters did not want.

This book seeks to understand the role of regions in the provision of security (and insecurity) practices across the globe. Specialists with expertise in the regions they examine present eight case studies and analyses of the Americas, Africa and the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Europe. Discussing both The State and people in the context of security, this book examines four categories; inter-state security, transnational criminal practices (the drugs trade, human trafficking migration), proliferation issues (both nuclear and non-nuclear), and issues of domestic/state collapse. The book uses an inclusive definition of security to include traditional and non-traditional conceptions, and incorporates the use of force and the threat of the use of force, as well as issues related to the integrity of peoples. The chapters weave theory and case studies to provide a rich description of a variety of regional governance forms; and, where applicable, the absence of them to move beyond regionalism to consider the key determining features of regional governance. Comparative Regional Security Governance will be of interest to students and scholars of international security, international relations and governance.

This book provides insights into the theoretical framework of 'tensions' related to care for children and the elderly. It analyzes if, and under what conditions, welfare state reforms have contributed to strengthening existing tensions, creating new tensions, or relaxing such tensions.

This book provides a systematic and comparative account of the rise of 'new challenger parties' across Western Europe. It analyses how parties that challenge the conventional party system by addressing issues neglected by existing parties can succeed and fail. Systematically comparing 229 elections since 1950 across 15 European democracies, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Benelux and Scandinavian countries, this book questions why new challenger parties are more successful in some countries than others, and analyses the conditions that determine their emergence and subsequent success or failure. As one of the first systematic and comparative examinations of new challenger parties, this book looks at both new politics parties and extreme-right parties, and the structures to aid their emergence at the time of an election. Identifying two distinctive stages of party development, the author adopts a 'double-hurdle' model involving, first, the chances of emergence, and second, sustained success. This framework, in combination with a wide-range of empirical data, provides for an innovative and insightful analysis of a neglected topic. New Challenger Parties in Western Europe will be of interest to students and scholars of government, comparative politics and political parties.