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.

A unique analysis that assesses how we can determine which country will be the next world leader. Will China surpass the United States as the world's leader? In American Global Pre-eminence, William R. Thompson argues that the answer depends on leads in technological innovation, energy, and global reach. These are the forces that influence the hierarchy of global power-a system which began emerging a thousand years ago and started becoming more evident after the 1490s, especially after Dutch activities in the seventeenth century and British operations in the nineteenth century. The US followed in this fashion after 1945. Yet leads do not last forever. Ironically, as it becomes clearer how technological innovation, military force, and energy power interact, the processes under scrutiny may themselves be fundamentally transforming. Thus, Thompson contends, the real policy question is not whether the US is ahead or behind China but, rather, whether it will remain possible for a single state to lead the global system. As technological innovation, energy consumption, and global reach capability grow less concentrated, the prospects for systemic leadership shrink-even as global problems become more complex and acute. With a sweeping analysis of global power, Thompson provides a foundation for understanding the realities and possibilities of lead states past, present, and future.

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

"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 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.

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.

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.

Partisan gerrymandering, the drawing of legislative district lines to deliberately favor one political party, has been present and controversial in American politics since before the ratification of our Constitution. Yet in the past couple of decades, parties in power at the state level have developed greater expertise than ever before at redistricting to their own advantage. Since 2010, a series of legislative, electoral, and judicial events have given this issue a prominence it has never before seen, especially as it applies to the United States Congress. In Ground War, Nicholas Goedert tackles the controversies, litigation, and effects surrounding partisan gerrymandering of Congress. He contends that the appropriate actors to address the fairness of a map are nonpartisan commissions within each state, not the US courts. Goedert illustrates how existing measures and legal standards are too narrow-while they are well-adapted to evaluating maps in swing states in close elections, they fail to properly address states or national electoral environments that favor one party. In turn, Goedert demonstrates that the bias and responsiveness of partisan maps is highly sensitive to both the make-up of a state's electorate and the ephemeral election conditions under which individual elections take place. But this does not mean that partisan gerrymandering must be excused as a dilemma without a reasonable remedy. Using multiple empirical approaches and a novel metric to measure the partisan fairness of maps, Ground War shows that nonpartisan commissions, adopted state-by-state, represent the best alternative to legislative districting. These commissions foster competitive elections, produce unbiased delegations, and give consideration to representational claims distinctive to each state. A rigorous account that explains how our system works and provides practical solutions for improving it, Ground War is an essential work for all scholars of US elections.

A study of processes of political party formation and change in new democracies. This book argues that to understand party organizations we need to focus on politicians' electoral strategies. The framework is used to analyze political party development in the new democracies of East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia.)

Over the last decade, the main area of sustained populist growth has been Western Europe, with populist movements reaching new heights in countries such as France, Italy, Austria and Holland. "Twenty-First Century Populism" analyses this phenomenon by looking at the conditions facilitating the emergence and success of populism in specific national contexts and then examining why populism has flourished or floundered in those countries. The book also discusses the degree to which populism has affected mainstream politics in Western Europe and examines the inter-relationship between populism, political parties, the media and democracy. Containing chapters by a series of country experts and renowned political scientists from across the continent, this volume is the first to offer an in-depth account of the reasons behind the populist wave in twenty-first century Europe.

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.

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 explores the historical development of post-war immigration politics in Norway, Sweden and Denmark from the perspective of the welfare state, examining how welfare states with high ambitions, generous and inclusive welfare schemes and a strong sense of egalitarianism cope with the pressures of immigration and growing diversities.

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.

Death squads have become an increasingly common feature of the modern world. In nearly all instances, their establishment is tolerated, encouraged, or undertaken by the state itself, which thereby risks its monoply on the use of force, one of the fundamental characteristics of modern states. Why do such a variety of regimes, under very different circumstances, condone such activity? Death Squads in Global Perspective hopes to answer that question and explain not only their development, but also why they can be expected to proliferate in the early 21st century.

Assessing the Dynamics of Democratization grows out of attempts by academics and activists to contribute to transformative politics by building up more and better evidence, and analysing the processes of democratisation in a way that is theoretically more inclusive than in the mainstream assessments that have come to parallel the industry of measuring economic growth. The book summarises the critique of these mainstream assessments, proposes an alternative framework, and shows how the alternative works through a case study of the largest of the new democracies, Indonesia. It is a book for critical scholars, students and practitioners.

EU member states and candidate countries are increasingly exposed to the domestic impact of EU regulations, policy instruments, and discourses in the fields of gender equality and antidiscrimination. This impact not only affects national or subnational legislations and equality machineries, but also the framing and the wording of these policies, providing domestic actors with new resources and opportunity structures. This book explores the divergent policy outputs in the member states as regards the making of gender and other equalities, bringing together the most recent insights from Europeanization and gender scholars from a discursive-sociological perspective. Using largely unpublished empirical data, the book addresses policy issues ranging from gender violence to reconciliation and antidiscrimination policies, through case studies and comparisons covering up to 29 European countries. The result is a book that provides us with a more realistic and complex picture of Europeanization processes.