This book is the first comparative analysis of the political behaviour of older people, using evidence from 20+ European democracies. In contrast to younger people across European societies, older people do not behave uniformly. For political participation in later life, it matters where and when individuals have grown up and in which country they become old.

This book explores the role of new modes of governance in helping future member states to cope with their accession to the European Union. The authors demonstrate that the accession countries of the Southern and Eastern enlargements have lacked two fundamental preconditions for the emergence and effectiveness of new modes of governance: state and non-state actors with sufficient resources to engage in non-hierarchical coordination to improve the effectiveness of public policy. This 'governance capacity' has been largely taken for granted by the governance literature since it has almost exclusively focused on Western democracies. The double weakness of transition countries results in a serious dilemma for governance research and practice alike - the stronger the need for non-hierarchical modes of governance, the less favourable are the conditions for their emergence and effectiveness.

How autocracy flourished even as the economy failed in VenezuelaAn alarming number of countries that once were seemingly stable democracies have veered in recent years toward authoritarianism a trend known as "democratic backsliding." One of those countries in Venezuela, which enjoyed periods of democratically elected governments in the latter half of the twentieth century but in the past two decades has increasingly descended into autocratic rule, coupled with economic collapse. Venezuela's Transition to Authoritarianism, written by a veteran scholar of Venezuela and Latin American politics generally explores how and why this happened. Corrales argues that Venezuela's slide began with the policies of former president Hugo Chavez policies that were based on government control of the economy and in turn generated a lingering economic crisis. After he succeeded Chavez in 2013, Nicolas Maduro not only entrenched the failed economic policies but also responded to various crises by establishing institutions that further undermined democracy. Each of Maduro's responses may have solved a short-term problem but collectively they destroyed both any pretense of democracy in Venezuela and prospects for his own long-term success. Corrales analyzes the lingering crisis in Venezuela by comparing it to twenty cases in Latin America where presidents were forced out of office. Regardless of how the current situation ends in Venezuela, His book illuminates the depressing cycle in which semi-authoritarian regimes become increasingly autocratic in response to crises, only to cause new crises that led to even greater authoritarianism.

The way in which elections are run is changing, as radical reforms or experiments have been introduced across the world. This text establishes why election administration might be used by political elites to win and maintain power. It identifies the role of elite interests in shaping election administration in USA, UK and Ireland.

This book is distinguished by its use of the antebellum US experience as a foil to address the under-explored question of what makes the EU viable. The nature of political conflict in both cases is defined in terms of four contested rules of the game: state sovereignty, federal competences, political representation and decision-making procedures. Hence, viabilty is conceptualized as the ability to find an agreement over these four elements.
The analysis shows that, to remain viable, the antebellum USA resorted to an ultimately untenable voluntary centralization of these rules of the game. Conversely, the EU has maintained a dynamic equilibrium, although this is not a self-reinforcing process. The transatlantic contrast is then used to examine proposals for reforming the EU, especially its system of political representation. The comparison reveals that, despite high expectations, changing the system of representation is no shortcut solution for the EU's constitutional woes.

Explores the need for political science to pay more attention to complex interactions involving politically relevant groups. Distinguished contributors report on data from around the world and at different levels of political decision making - from 'below the radar' in local communities to global negations at the World Trade Organization.

"The New Progressive Dilemma" documents the international diffusion, ideological meaning and long-term political implications of the 'ideas' that informed the late twentieth-century revolution in thinking inside the British Labour Party - a revolution that had important antecedents in Australia.

A complete guide for how small states can be strikingly successful and influential-if they assess their situations and adapt their strategies. Small states are crucial actors in world politics. Yet, they have been relegated to a second tier of International Relations scholarship. In A Small State's Guide to Influence in World Politics, Tom Long shows how small states can identify opportunities and shape effective strategies to achieve their foreign policy goals. To do so, Long puts small states' relationships at the center of his approach. Although small states are defined by their position as materially weaker actors vis-a-vis large states, Long argues that this condition does not condemn them to impotence or irrelevance. Drawing on typological theory, Long builds an explanation of when and how small states might achieve their goals. The book assesses a global range of cases-both successes and failures-and offers a set of tools for scholars and policymakers to understand how varying international conditions shape small states' opportunities for influence.

This authoritative yet accessible introduction to understanding Europe today moves beyond accounts of European integration to provide a wide-ranging and nuanced study of contemporary Europe and its historical development. This fully updated edition adds material on recent developments, such as Brexit and the migrant and Eurozone crises. The concept of Europe is instilled with a plethora of social, cultural, economic, and political meanings. Throughout history, and still today, scholars writing on Europe, and politicians involved in national or European politics, often disagree on the geographic limits of this space and the defining elements of Europe. Europe is, therefore, first and foremost a concept that takes different shapes and meanings depending on the realm of life on which it is applied and on the historical period under investigation. At a given point in time, depending on the perspective we adopt and the situation in which we find ourselves, Europe may represent very different things. Thus, we should better talk about 'Europes' in plural. What is Europe? explores these evolving conceptions of Europe from antiquity to the present. This book is all the more timely as Europe responds to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Britain's departure from the European Union, financial slump, refugee emergencies, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This book offers a fully updated introduction to European studies from an interdisciplinary perspective. It is a crucial companion to any undergraduate or graduate course on Europe and the European Union. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book examines the changes in the career experiences and profiles of 350 European prime ministers in 26 European democracies from 1945 to 2020. It builds on a theoretical framework, which claims that the decline of party government along with the increase of populism, technocracy, and the presidentialization of politics have influenced the careers of prime ministers over the past 70 years. The findings show that prime ministers' career experiences became less political and more technical. Moreover, their career profiles shifted from a traditional type of 'party-agent' to a new type of 'party-principal'. These changes affected the recruitment of executive elites and their political representation in European democracies, albeit with different intensity and speed.

As the Asia-Pacific region develops in economic strength and influence in the twenty-first century, a deeper understanding of the differences and commonalities among the countries of this region is needed. Australia and Malaysia share the Asia-Pacific region with powerful neighbours such as China and Indonesia, as well as small fledgling democracies such as Timor Leste. This timely volume compares these two societies on key issues and tensions relating to globalization and social transformation, including foreign policy and national security; multiculturalism and citizenship; the middle class; global governance; migrants, human rights and international students. The contributors explore the contested and lively debates that emerge through the expanded mobility of ideas and people in this so-called 'Asian Century'.

This book analyses the evolving geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific region and explains how Djibouti fits in the global strategies of four major powers-the US, China, Japan, and France. It shows how Djibouti is emerging as a key nation in the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific, explores the interconnections between Djibouti and the Indian as well as Pacific Oceans, and through Djibouti examines broader trends in contemporary great power politics in the Indo-Pacific region, including the Belt and Road Initiative of China. Moving beyond contemporary works on the region, the author integrates Africa and the Middle East with discussions on the Indo-Pacific to illustrate the coalescing of strategic geography from Eastern Africa to the Western coast of the Americas. A major intervention, the volume will be essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and researchers of politics and international relations, security studies, African studies, peace and conflict studies, and maritime studies.

This is an in-depth analysis of the various methods used by small states to overcome their vulnerabilities in the international arena. With its balanced approach and variety of contributions, this book is of interest to researchers and academics who focus on the developing world or multilateral diplomacy.

This book engages theoretically and empirically with the unprecedented wave of public management reforms in public hospitals in Europe in the past 25 years. It provides a useful overview of these reforms and studies the way in which they have influenced the ability of national policy-making institutions to co-ordinate the system of public hospitals as a whole. Using a comparative structure, as well as original empirical data collected by the author, the book examines case studies on which little has so far been published for an international audience in English.

This book presents a comparative perspective to the study of European politics, focusing on the unique and transformative effect of European Union on the politics of its member states - in effect, the Europeanization of European politics. For no other world region is there a similar intensity of Treaty and other obligations on a set of neighboring states, nor a comparable depth of of supranational governance. The concept of Europeanism as an evaluative theme is used to explore this unique, sui generis, region, its states, and its political transformation in the 21st century.

This book explores the origins of nationalism and the ideal of nation/state congruency since early-modern European thought, their transformation over time and endurance in contemporary political thought and IR theory. The author deploys a Lacanian-psychoanalytical reading of nationalism and the nation/state that goes beyond methodological nationalism and state-centrism critiques. He offers a genealogical inquiry into the emergence of the nation/state congruency ideal, thus exposing and problematising the practices that render nationalism and the ideal of the nation/state necessary. Offering a new way to read the ontology and epistemology of the nation/state, this work will be of interest to students and scholars of nations and nationalism, political thought, critical international relations and critical security studies.

This book offers theoretical and methodological guidelines for researching the complex regulation of local infrastructure, utilities and public services in the context of rapid urbanisation, technological change, and climate change. It examines the interactions between regulators, public officers, infrastructure and utilities firms, public service providers, citizens, and civil society organisations. It contains contributions from academics and practitioners from various disciplinary perspectives and from many regions of the world, illustrated with case studies from several sectors including water, natural gas and electricity distribution, local public transport, district heating, urban waste, and environmental services.

Tannam focuses on the role of bureaucracies when dealing with conflict in two international organisations, the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN), providing a unique comparative account of their policy-making procedures.

Taking the reader through a long view of American history, What Happened to the Vital Center? offers a novel and important contribution to the ongoing scholarly and popular discussion of how America fell apart and what might be done to end the Cold Civil War that fractures the country and weakens the national resolve. In What Happened to the Vital Center?, Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney Milkis tackle a foundational question within American political history: Is current partisan polarization, aggravated by populist disdain for constitutional principles and institutions, a novel development in American politics? Populism is not a new threat to the country's democratic experiment, but now insurgents intrude directly on elections and government. During previous periods of populist unrest, the US was governed by resilient parties that moderated extremist currents within the political system. This began to crumble during the 1960s, as anti-institutionalist incursions into the Democratic and Republican organizations gave rise to reforms that empowered activists at the expense of the median voter and shifted the controlling power over parties to the executive branch. Gradually, the moderating influence that parties played in structuring campaigns and the policy process eroded to the point where extreme polarization dominated and decision-making power migrated to the presidency. Weakened parties were increasingly dominated by presidents and their partnerships with social activists, leading to a gridlocked system characterized by the politics of demonization and demagoguery. Executive-centered parties more easily ignore the sorts of moderating voices that had prevailed in an earlier era. While the Republican Party is more susceptible to the dangers of populism than the Democrats, both parties are animated by a presidency-led, movement-centered vision of democracy. After tracing this history, the authors dismiss calls to return to some bygone era. Rather, the final section highlights the ways in which the two parties can be revitalized as institutions of collective responsibility that can transform personal ambition and rancorous partisanship into principled conflict over the profound issues that now divide the country. The book will transform our understanding of how we ended up in our current state of extreme polarization and what we can do to fix it.

This book focuses on the relationship between European integration, its outputs and national institutional and political settings. It explores the political mechanisms through which the EU plays a role in domestic social policy changes.

This book examines EU discourses on Turkey in the European Commission, European Parliament and three EU member states (France, Germany and Britain), to reveal the discursive construction of European identity through EU representations of Turkey. Based on a poststructuralist framework that conceptualizes identity as discursively constructed through difference, the book applies Critical Discourse Analysis to the analysis of texts and argues that there are multiple Europe(s) that are constructed in talks over the enlargement of Turkey, varying within and between different ideological, national and institutional contexts. The book discerns four main discourse topics over which these Europe(s) are constructed, corresponding to the conceptualization of Europe as a security community, as an upholder of democratic values, as a political project and as a cultural space. The book argues that Turkey constitutes a key case in exploring various discursive constructs of European identity, since the talks on Turkey pave the way for the construction of different versions of Europe in discourse.

"The Future of Global Relations "centers on two intertwined themes: (a) the collapse of US global hegemony and (b) the rise of a multi-centric world order of regional powers from China to Africa, from Latin America to India, from the Middle East to Russia and the European Union. The ascendancy of these regional powers means that humanity has reached a historical turning point that signals the incapacity and impracticality of empire-building, thereby bringing an end to the search for hegemony and efforts by one nation to achieve domination or primacy over all others. The future of global relations will be defined by a more integrated and mutually cooperative world order of regions in which there are multiple centers of political and economic power. These regional centers will continue to mature under the ideology of "regionalism" and through the long historical process of "regionalization."

This book explores the causes of corruption in the Middle East and North Africa through a systematic cross-national comparative analysis of fifteen countries in the region. It aims to explain causal relationships between corruption and differences in political and socio-economic dimensions within these different countries over the period 1999-2010. The countries are grouped together into three sub-regions (the Gulf region, North Africa, and Mashreq plus Yemen). The author finds that the main variables that showed robustness in impacting the intensity of corruption are the rule of law, quality of regulations, and trade openness. Poverty rates and income inequality have been clear triggers for petty corruption. Meanwhile, natural resources endowments have shown less of an impact on the levels of corruption, and similarly women's empowerment has not been found to be a strong indicator.

Thomas Lundberg critically examines the claim that party list-elected members of Britain's devolved assemblies are somehow 'second-class' representatives. The Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly are elected by the controversial mixed-member proportional (MMP) system. Empirical evidence compares British representatives to their MMP-elected counterparts in Germany and in New Zealand. Although list-elected representatives in Britain do appear to have a different constituency role, these representatives add an important element of pluralism to Britain's majoritarian politics.