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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Comparative politics
Statesmanship, Character and Leadership demonstrates how individual leaders acted at critical turning points in American history. Terry Newell's analysis defines statesmanship, distinguishes it from leadership, and places it at the forefront of politics. Using seven leaders as case studies, Newell examines how building a transcendent purpose, employing artful politics, and using compelling persuasion are central to achieving a good society. He places special emphasis on the importance of character. This fresh perspective on leadership offers techniques for today's leaders who are committed to moving beyond politics as usual.
The book offers new insights into how ethnicity, language and regional-local identity interact within the context of Ukrainian political reform, and indicates how these reforms affect social cohesion among ethno-cultural groups. While the individual chapters each focus on one or a few facets of the overall research question, together they draw a nuanced picture of the multifaceted challenges to creating and consolidating social cohesion in a nationalizing state. The concept integrates various disciplines, including political science, international relations, law, and sociology. Correspondingly, the contributions are based on various methodological approaches, ranging from legal analysis over media discourse analysis, individual and focus group interviews to analysis of data from a representative population survey. The findings of the in-depth study are discussed within the broader context of comparative research on diversity management and social cohesion in fragmented societies.
This book focuses on the European Union as an important actor in international relations and international political economy. The EU negotiates international economic agreements, represents Europe in international organizations, and is a major trading bloc and currency area. To what extent and under what conditions the EU can use its considerable economic power to assert its interests in the international arena is a relevant question for students, researchers and practitioners alike. To explore this question, the textbook introduces the concept of "actorness" and presents an overview of the actorness debate and theories used to explain actorness. In addition, it includes three empirical chapters on trade, finance and climate policy that apply various concepts and theories to study European actorness in the respective policy areas.
By the end of the 1970s, contaminated sites had emerged as one of the most complex and urgent environmental issues affecting industrialized countries. The authors show that small and prosperous Switzerland is no exception to the pervasive problem of sites contamination, the legacy of past practices in waste management having left some 38,000 contaminated sites throughout the country. This book outlines the problem, offering evidence that open and polycentric environmental decision-making that includes civil society actors is valuable. They propose an understanding of environmental management of contaminated sites as a political process in which institutions frame interactions between strategic actors pursuing sometimes conflicting interests. In the opening chapter, the authors describe the influences of politics and the power relationships between actors involved in decision-making in contaminated sites management, which they term a "wicked problem." Chapter Two offers a theoretical framework for understanding institutions and the environmental management of contaminated sites. The next five chapters present a detailed case study on environmental management and contaminated sites in Switzerland, focused on the Bonfol Chemical Landfill. The study and analysis covers the establishment of the landfill under the first generation of environmental regulations, its closure and early remediation efforts, and the gambling on the remediation objectives, methods and funding in the first decade of the 21st Century. The concluding chapter discusses the question of whether the strength of environmental regulations, and the type of interactions between public, private, and civil society actors can explain the environmental choices in contaminated sites management. Drawing lessons from research, the authors debate the value of institutional flexibility for dealing with environmental issues such as contaminated sites.
This book analyzes how mainstream and new parties are building their digital platforms and transitioning from traditional (offline) organizations into the digital world. The authors present an innovative empirical exploration of the democratic consequences and technical challenges of the digitalization of party organizations from a comparative perspective. They provide an original account of how party digital platforms are regulated and used, and a crucial discussion of the main technological and democratic issues that political parties face in their digital transition. Further, the authors assess the consequences of these digitalization processes for political participation and party membership, as well as the impact on party organizational models and electoral campaign potential. The book looks into one of the less-studied aspects of digital democracy, also presenting empirical evidence and case studies. It presents different parties and their adoption of digital participation platforms, from the Pirate Parties in Northern Europe to Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise in France, the Five Stars Movement in Italy, or the German Greens. Therefore, the book is a must-read for scholars of political science, policy-makers, and practitioners, interested in a better understanding of the transition of political parties into the digital world.
Manufacturing Possibilities examines adjustment dynamics in the steel, automobile and machinery industries in Germany, the U.S., and Japan since World War II. As national industrial actors in each sector try to compete in global markets, the book argues that they recompose firm and industry boundaries, stakeholder identities and interests, and governance mechanisms at all levels of their political economies. Micro level study of industrial transformation in this way provides a significant window on macro level processes of political economic change in the three societies. Theoretically, the book marks a departure from both neoliberal economic and historical institutionalist perspectives on change in advanced political economies. It characterizes industrial change as a creative, bottom-up process driven by reflective social actors. This alternative view consists of two distinctive claims. The first is that action is social, reflective, and ultimately creative. When their interactive habits are disrupted, industrial actors seek to repair their relations by reconceiving them. Such imaginative interaction redefines interest and causes unforeseen possibilities for action to emerge, enabling actors to trump existing rules and constraints. Second, industrial change driven by creative action is recompositional. In the social process of reflection, actors rearrange, modify, reconceive, and reposition inherited organizational forms and governance mechanisms as they experiment with solutions to the challenges that they face. Continuity in relations is interwoven with continuous reform and change. Most remarkably, creativity in the recomposition process makes the introduction of entirely new practices and relations possible. Ultimately, the message of Manufacturing Possibilities is that social study of change in advanced political economies should devote itself to the discovery of possibility. Preoccupation with constraint and failure to appreciate the capaciousness of reflective social action has led much of contemporary debate to misrecognize the dynamics of change. As a result, discussion of the range of adjustment possibilities in advanced political economies has been unnecessarily limited.
Worldviews of Aspiring Powers provides a serious study of the domestic foreign policy debates in five world powers who have gained more influence as the US's has waned: China, Japan, India, Russia and Iran. Featuring a leading regional scholar for each essay, each essay identifies the most important domestic schools of thought--nationalists, realists, globalists, idealists/exceptionalists--and connects them to the historical and institutional sources that fuel each nation's foreign policy experience. While scholars have applied this approach to US foreign policy, this book is the first to track the competing schools of foreign policy thought within five of the world's most important rising powers. Concise and systematic, Worldviews of Aspiring Powers will serve as both an essential resource for foreign policy scholars trying to understand international power transitions and as a text for courses that focus on the same.
This fully updated fifth edition of An Introduction to African Politics is an ideal textbook for those new to the study of this fascinating continent.
Despite any evidence against it, political parties still represent the most important collective actor in a democratic political system. Their role in representing pluralism and their electoral centrality is not undermined, even when it is strongly questioned. As long as political parties can be understood as representative actors articulating political demands, this book focuses on the capacity of Italian political parties to mobilize resources and financial resources in particular. Through the analysis of private financial donations to political parties, a neglected source of information that will be fundamental in the near future, the author assesses their connective capability with specific interests' representatives in the last decades in order to provide evidence of their changing representational role as collective actors.
This volume is a series of original articles analyzing eleven case studies of revolutionary movements which have reconstituted themselves into formal political parties now contesting electoral politics. These case studies are drawn from Africa and the Americas and examined within the context of the democratic transitions which have taken place in the developing world. The book's principal objective is to analyze the factors influencing the successes and failures of these former politico-military movements within this new context of democracy and electoralism.
What causes a government to invest-or not invest-in poor citizens, especially mass education? In The Education of Nations, Stephen Kosack focuses on three radically different developing countries whose developmental trajectories bear little resemblance to each other-Brazil, Ghana, and Taiwan-and offers an elegant and pragmatic answer to this crucially important question. Quite simply, the level of investment in mass education is the product of one of two simple conditions, one political and one economic. The first condition is the nature and success of political entrepreneurs at organizing the poor politically; the second is the flexibility of the labor market faced by employers who need skilled workers. Drawing from a half-century of evidence, he has found that irrespective of every other factor, these two conditions alone explain whether education is available to the poor or restricted to elites as well as many of the key features of education systems. An empirically rich and theoretically novel study, The Education of Nations will change how we think about the developing world's approach to education and development.
EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply shaken societies and lives around the world. This powerful book reveals how the pandemic has intensified socio-economic problems and inequalities across the world whilst offering visions for a better future informed by social movements and public sociology. Bringing together experts from 27 countries, the authors explore the global echoes of the pandemic and the different responses adopted by governments, policy makers and activists. The new expressions of social action, and forms of solidarity and protest, are discussed in detail, from the Black Lives Matter protests to the French Strike Movement and the Lebanese Uprising. This is a unique global analysis on the current crisis and the contemporary world and its outcomes.
This book provides a broad overview of the main trends in mass
attitudes towards domestic politics and European integration from
the 1970s until today. Particularly in the last two decades, the
"end of the permissive consensus" around European integration has
forced analysts to place public opinion at the centre of their
concerns. The book faces this challenge head on, and the overview
it provides goes well beyond the most commonly used indicators. On
the one hand, it shows how integration's deepening and enlargement
involved polities and societies whose fundamental traits in terms
of political culture - regime support, political engagement,
ideological polarization - have remained anything but static or
homogeneous. On the other hand, it addresses systematically what
Scharpf (1999) has long identified as the main sources of the
democratic deficits of the EU: the lack of a sense of collective
identity, the lack of a Europe-wide structure for political
accountability, and the lack of recognition of the EU as a
legitimate political authority. In other words, it focuses on the
fundamental dimensions of how Europeans relate to the EU: identity
(the sense of an "European political community"; representation
(the perception that European elites and institutions articulate
citizens' interests and are responsive to them); and policy scope
(the legitimacy awarded to the EU as a proper locus of
policy-making). It does so by employing a cohesive theoretical
framework derived from the entire IntUne project, survey and
macro-social data encompassing all EU member countries, and
state-of-the-art methods.
European Identity examines how Europe is represented linguistically in the news media of four EU countries, France, Italy, Poland, and the UK, through the use of an electronic corpus built from newspapers and television news transcripts. This multilingual comparable corpus, is composed of the entire contents of four newspapers published in each country, collected over two periods of three months, and the transcriptions of two TV news broadcasts, collected over two periods of two months. The theoretical and methodological frameworks adopted include discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The individual chapters investigate various aspects of European identity as it is discursively construed in the news media of the different countries, such as Europe as a political and geographic entity, European Union institutions, European history, citizenship, and immigration. Based on a bottom-up orientation and using both quantitative and qualitative methods, all chapters but one use a comparative approach to the data, juxtaposing the journalist representations of Europe in two or more languages. The fundamental aim of the volume is to demonstrate how linguistic analysis, and in particular the study of large amounts of linguistic data, can make a vital contribution to the analysis of political and social issues
This book presents in-depth analyses of the data gathered for 26 years by the Political Elites of Latin America project (PELA), the most comprehensive database about the topic in the world. Since 1994, PELA has conducted around 9,000 personal interviews with representative samples of the Legislative Powers of 18 Latin American countries, generating a unique resource for the study of political elites in a comparative perspective. Now, this contributed volume brings together studies that dig into the data gathered by PELA to discuss important topics related to the challenges faced by representative democracy in Latin America. After an introductory chapter that presents the potential of the PELA database, the book is structured in two parts. The first addresses in eight chapters important aspects of representative democracy such as political ambition, political trust, satisfaction with democracy, clientelism and the quality of democracy. It then discusses three relevant issues in Latin American political dynamics such as executive-legislative relations, women's participation as representatives, and the meaning of China and the United States in national politics. The second part addresses in five chapters studies of seven national cases that are representative of regional heterogeneity. These chapters aim to examine parliamentarian elites' attitudes in different political systems with regard to a variety of relevant issues such as institutional trust, satisfaction with democracy, Executive-Legislative relations, clientelism, and gender questions. Furthermore, these chapters intend to evince the evolution of such attitudes in the course of the last two decades. Politics and Political Elites in Latin America: Challenges and Trends will be of interest to scholars and students of comparative politics in general and, more particularly, to those interested in the challenges faced by representative democracy not only in Latin America, but in many parts of the world.
This book aims to establish a dialogue around the various "urban sanctuary" policies and other formal or informal practices of hospitality toward migrants that have emerged or been strengthened in cities in the Americas in the last decade. The authors articulate local governance initiatives in migrant protection with a larger range of social and political actors and places them within a broader context of migrations in the Western Hemisphere (including case studies of Toronto, New York, Austin, Mexico City, and Lima, among others). The book analyzes in particular the limits of local efforts to protect migrants and to identify the latitude of action at the disposal of local actors. It examines the efforts of municipal governments and also considers the role taken by cities from a larger perspective, including the actions of immigrant rights associations, churches, NGOs, and other actors in protecting vulnerable migrants.
This book seeks to consistently explain the role of ideas and institutions in policy outcomes, and addresses the problem of how resource nationalism causes a deficit of public accountability in oil producing countries from Latin America and the Caribbean. The authors present a causal mechanism linking ideas and policy outcomes through institutional arrangements, focusing on policy design to describe the role of instruments selection and combination in improving or reducing public accountability through agenda setting, policy formulation, cross-sectorial coordination and political interplays.
This book presents solutions to problems that are total and based on thinking about how and why humans have organized themselves. It discusses how to avoid the now well-documented Holocene Extinction, propelled by climate change, wars, resource depletion, desertification, degrading knowledge quality, famine, and deterioration of societies overall. It explains why we cannot respond effectively with hedonistic, incompetent, corrupt, and anarchistic "liberal democracy" and why neither personality cult regimes can suffice. The book offers a model of an organic social structure embodying a collective consciousness of communitarianism and Platonic-style ethos. Putting an emphasis on the re-establishment of Classical Greek virtue, it offers solutions to resolve identity politics, alienation, and meritocracy. While doing so, the author opposes the "everyone is equal" ideology to govern the section of policymakers, instead circumscribing "rights" in terms of responsibilities, prioritizing education and training to carry forth the ethos of valuing truth above materialism, and developing Durkheim's social brain via a new discipline, "sociointelligence". The book goes on to explain how underpinning these elements is a comprehensive elucidation of often misunderstood words like "liberty", "freedom", "authoritarianism", and "democracy". All of these areas are arranged and combined in uniquely describing the organic society the author deems necessary to avoid human extinction. As a result, the book presents a “new organicityâ€, where the emerging transhumanism seeks to transcend hydrocarbon-based life with humanly-constructed life. This book will appeal to students, researchers, and scholars of political science, philosophy, and the social sciences interested in a better understanding of complexity, democratic theory, Holocene Extinction, organic thinking, and meritocratic societies.Â
This book provides a comparative and historical analysis of totalitarianism and considers why Spain became totalitarian during its inquisition but not France; and why Germany became totalitarian during the previous century, but not Sweden. The author pushes the concept of totalitarianism back into the pre-modern period and challenges Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil. Instead, he presents an alternative framework that can explain why some states become totalitarian and why they induce people to commit evil acts.
This book focuses on the ways in which unofficial modes of border crossings are practised by the Thai Ban, along the Mekong Thai-Lao border. In doing so, the book assesses how these border crossings can be theorised as a contribution to existing literature on borderland studies. With that, the book discusses the importance of the notion of the Third Space and its effects on the pluralities of border-crossings in the borderland by weaving together spatial negotiations, temporal negotiations, and negotiations of political subjectivity. To illustrate the importance and complexity of the notion of the Third Space, the borderland of Khong Chiam-Sanasomboun, an area composed of quasi-state checkpoints as well as mobile checkpoints, is used as a case study. The author employs an ethnographic approach using the four methods of participant observations, interviews, interpreting visual presentations, and essay readings to examine the everyday practices of the Thai Ban people in crossing the border between the riverine villages in the two nation-states of Thailand and Lao PDR. With this, the findings in the fieldwork reveal that people engaged in everyday border-crossings in the riverine area do not simply embrace or reject the existence of Thai-Lao territory. Most of the time, the stance of Thai Ban people is the mixture of subversion, rejection, and acceptance of the boundary resulting in the sedentary assumption in the form of Thai-Lao territory co-existing with people's everyday mobility.
The New Port Moresby: Gender, Space, and Belonging in Urban Papua New Guinea explores the ways in which educated, professional women experience living in Port Moresby, the burgeoning capital of Papua New Guinea. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship, the book adds to an emerging literature on cities in the "Global South" as sites of oppression, but also resistance, aspiration, and activism. Taking an intersectional feminist approach, the book draws on a decade of research conducted among the educated professional women of Port Moresby, offering unique insight into class transitions and the perspectives of this small but significant cohort. The New Port Moresby expands the scope of research and writing about gendered experiences in Port Moresby, moving beyond the idea that the city is an exclusively hostile place for women. Without discounting the problems of uneven development, the author argues that the city's new places offer women a degree of freedom and autonomy in a city predominantly characterized by fear and restriction. In doing so, it offers an ethnographically rich perspective on the interaction between the "global" and the "local" and what this might mean for feminism and the advancement of equity in the Pacific and beyond. The New Port Moresby will find an audience among anthropologists, particularly those interested in the urban Pacific, feminist geographers committed to expanding research to include cities in the Global South and development theorists interested in understanding the roles played by educated elites in less economically developed contexts. There have been few ethnographic monographs about Port Moresby and those that do exist have tended to marginalize or ignore gender. Yet as feminist geographers make clear, women and men are positioned differently in the world and their relationship to the places in which they live is also different. The book has no predecessors and stands alone in the Pacific as an account of this kind. As such, The New Port Moresby should be read by scholars and students of diverse disciplines interested in urbanization, gender, and the Pacific.
Qualitative comparative methods - and specifically controlled qualitative comparisons - are central to the study of politics. They are not the only kind of comparison, though, that can help us better understand political processes and outcomes. Yet there are few guides for how to conduct non-controlled comparative research. This volume brings together chapters from more than a dozen leading methods scholars from across the discipline of political science, including positivist and interpretivist scholars, qualitative methodologists, mixed-methods researchers, ethnographers, historians, and statisticians. Their work revolutionizes qualitative research design by diversifying the repertoire of comparative methods available to students of politics, offering readers clear suggestions for what kinds of comparisons might be possible, why they are useful, and how to execute them. By systematically thinking through how we engage in qualitative comparisons and the kinds of insights those comparisons produce, these collected essays create new possibilities to advance what we know about politics.
This edited volume offers new insights into the populist wave that is affecting democratic politics in a large number of countries. The authoritarian populist turn that has developed in the US and various European countries in recent years both reflects and exacerbates the polarization of public opinion that increasingly characterizes democratic politics. The book seeks to explain how and why authoritarian populist opinion has developed and been mobilised in democratic countries. It also explores the implications of this growth in authoritarian, anti-immigrant sentiment for the operation of democratic politics in the future. It concludes that liberals may need to abandon their big-hearted internationalist instinct for open and unmanaged national borders and tacit indifference to illegal immigration. They should instead fashion a distinctively liberal position on immigration based on the socially progressive traditions of planning, public services, community cohesion and worker protection against exploitation. To do otherwise would be to provide the forces of illiberal authoritarianism with an opportunity to advance unparalleled since the 1930s and to destroy the extraordinary post-war achievements of the liberal democratic order.
This book examines the relationship between migration, diversification and inequality in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The authors advance a view of migration as a diversifying force, arguing that it is necessary to grapple with the intersection of group identities, state policy and economic opportunities as part of the formation of inequalities that have deep historical legacies and substantial future implications. Exploring evidence for inequality amongst migrant populations, the book also addresses the role of multicultural politics and migration policy in entrenching inequalities, and the consequences of migrant inequalities for political participation, youth development and urban life. |
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