This book analyses institutional reforms implemented by Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, under his second administration from 2012 to 2020. Also examined is the evolution in the role of such actors in Japanese politics as bureaucrats, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) factions, and backbenchers of the ruling party. Chapters offer multi-dimensional explanations for the preconditions of successful gradual institutional change in political systems, characterized by relatively strong veto players, rigid governmental structures, and numerous unofficial decision-making rules. It is argued that enhancement of the prime minister's position was implemented through the creative use of pre-existing policy venues, coupled with minor institutional changes in decision-making bodies. Using three illustrated case studies, it is demonstrated how the prime minister managed to centralize the decision-making process: a result of strategic appointment of ministers, empowerment of the Cabinet Secretariat and also taking advantage of wider advisory organs, largely circumventing deliberations on key policies in the ruling party. Seemingly minor changes thus manifested in a major redefinition of decision-making patterns: a result of the long-term perspective of the Abe administration. Gradual Institutional Change in Japan: Kantei Leadership under the Abe Administration will be useful for students seeking to understand the process of successful gradual institutional change and for scholars of Japanese studies and political science.

This book focuses on issues of current constitutional controversy and importance in Western and Central Europe.

This book provides the first detailed examination of the Attlee government's rejection of British participation in the Schuman Plan in 1950, which proposed the establishment of a common market for steel and coal as a way of avoiding future Franco-German conflict. This also represented Britain's rejection of a leading role in fashioning European political and economic intergration. Many received myths are contested: the Schuman Plan was not a bolt from the blue; domestic political circumstances did not make it impossible for Britain to join; participation would not have been incompatible with Britain's global and Commonwealth roles. Edmund Dell assesses Ernest Bevin's conduct as Foreign Secretary during this last year of his life: in declining health but still believing himself indispensable, he was arrogantly mistaken about the Schuman plan and lacked colleagues of comparable stature able to tell him he was wrong. The only hope was Stafford Cripps, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he was on the point of resignation due to ill-health and lacked the energy to press his doubts. Ministerial inadequacy was compounded by the Foreign Office, the leading officials in which were no less arrogant and quite as blind to the implications of the proposal. The consequence was a major policy failure which has influenced Britain's relations with its European partners right up to the present. Edmund Dell works with archival evidence, and the memoirs of participants, to place these events in the context of the 'big questions' dominating British policy formation: security, the dollar shortage, and the difficult relationship with an American administration intent both on attacking the sterling area and pressing for European federation. The result is an incisive revaluation of a key episode in post-war European history.

This book is the only one of its kind, providing a clear and exhaustive analysis of the different approaches to the future of Britain's second chamber. The House of Lords has long been the subject of proposals for reform - some successful, others not - and calls for the existing membership to be replaced by elected members have been a staple of political debate. The debate has been characterised by heat rather than light, proponents and opponents of change often talking past one another. This work gives shape to the debate, drawing out the role of the House of Lords, previous attempts at reform, and the different approaches to the future of the House. It develops the argument for each and analyses the current state of the debate about the future of the upper house in Britain's political system. -- .

The democratic ideal demands that the citizenry think critically about matters of public import. Yet many Democrats and Republicans in the United States have fallen short of that standard because political tribalism motivates them to acquire, perceive and evaluate political information in a biased manner. The result is an electorate that is more extreme, hostile and willing to reject unfavorable democratic outcomes. In this work, the author provides a host of actionable strategies that are designed to reduce the influence of political tribalism in our lives. The text includes instructions for plumbing the depths of political views; evaluating sources of political information; engaging in difficult political conversations; appraising political data; and assessing political arguments. The first of its kind, this how-to guide is a must-read for partisans who want to become more critical political thinkers.

Habermas's Public Sphere: A Critique analyzes the evolution of Juergen Habermas's social and political theory from the 1950s to the present by focusing on the explicit and on the tacit changes in his thinking about The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, his global academic bestseller, which has been translated into 30 languages. Integrating "public sphere," "discourse," and "reason," the three categories at the center of his lifelong work as a scholar and as a public intellectual, Habermas's classic public sphere concept has deeply influenced an unusually high number of disciplines in the social sciences and in the humanities. In the process, its complex methodology, whose sources are not always identified, can be perplexing and therefore lead to misunderstandings. While Habermas's "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere" (1992) contain several far-reaching clarifications, they still do not identify a number of the most important sources for his methodology, above all Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch. Hence, a key purpose of this study is to thoroughly analyze the Marxist critique of ideology that Habermas uses in dialectical fashion for his theory reconstruction of Immanuel Kant's liberal ideal of a rational-critical public as the organizational principle of the constitutional state and as the method of Enlightenment. Such dialectical thinking allows him to appropriate the structure of Reinhart Koselleck's Critique and Crisis and of Carl Schmitt's writings on the modern state while simultaneously upending their conservative critique of Liberalism and of the Enlightenment. However, this strategy restricts the application of his concept to his stylizations of the French Revolution and of his British "model case." This critique reinvigorates Habermas's seminal distinction between the purely political polis of antiquity, which excludes the private economy from the res publica, and the modern public sphere with its rational-critical discourse about commodity exchange and social labor in the political economy. At the same time, it identifies the crises of seventeenth-century England and the Dutch Republic as the origins of the new channels of public communication used to constantly evaluate the role of state power as political facilitator and regulator of an increasingly complex, dynamic, and crisis-prone market economy.

Crisis Communication, Liberal Democracy, and Ecological Sustainability provides a detailed and empirical analysis of the institutions, governing logics, risk-management practices, and crisis communication strategies involved in the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the 2010 BP oil crisis, and the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis. These human-engineered crises threaten sustainability through resource depletion, environmental degradation, and the growth of geo-political conflicts. Yet, the corporations responsible have returned to profitability by externalizing risks to communities and governments. In response to this pattern of crisis management, Nadesan argues that contemporary financial and energy complexes pose significant threats to liberal democracy and ecological sustainability. This book will be of interest to scholars of communication studies, cultural studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, and economics.

*Winner of the James S. Donnelly, Sr. Prize 2022* In Ireland, 2018, a constitutional ban that equated the life of a woman to the life of a fertilised embryo was overturned and abortion was finally legalised. This victory for the Irish Repeal movement set the country alight with euphoria. But, for some, the celebrations were short-lived - the new legislation turned out to be one of the most conservative in Europe. People still travel overseas for abortions and services are not yet fully commissioned in Northern Ireland. This book traces the history of the origins of the Eighth Amendment, which was drawn up in fear of a tide of liberal reforms across Europe. It draws out the lessons learned from the groundbreaking campaign in 2018, which was the culmination of a 35-year-long reproductive rights movement and an inspiring example of modern grassroots activism. It tells the story of the 'Repeal' campaign through the lens of the activists who are still fighting in a movement that is only just beginning.

Current international discourse on the new state of South Sudan seems fixated on the "state construction." This book aims to broaden the debate by examining the character of regulatory authority in South Sudan's borderlands in both contemporary and historical perspective. The contributions gathered here show that emerging border governance practices challenge the bounded categorization of "state" and "non-state," especially in the complex interactions between state, military, and business actors and power structures. It thus provides a timely and sophisticated contribution to the literature on African borderlands, examining a new state in creation at its borders, and providing an anthropologically and historically informed view of a rapidly evolving situation.

While great strides have been made since the Founding years, the United States continues to suffer from a high degree of political inequality. Simply put, some citizens have a louder voice in their democracy than others. Both the malapportioned Senate and Electoral College overrepresent Americans in small states, while gerrymandered districts poorly convert votes into power in the House of Representatives. Over four million Americans living in Washington, D.C. and the territories lack representation in Congress, while citizens everywhere face unnecessary burdens to cast ballots. Finally, biased media and questionable political funding render it difficult to hold elected officials accountable. This book explores these formidable problems and identifies the path to securing a fairer, more representative political system. Sourcing solutions directly from the Constitution, chapters outline the tools that could limit malapportionment, expand voting rights, control the influence of big donors and more. Achieving these reforms, however, requires an engaged citizenry that relentlessly demands change from those in power.

This book explores the connection between Bentham and Byron forged by the Greek struggle for independence. It focuses on the activities of the London Greek Committee, supposedly founded by disciples of Jeremy Bentham, which mounted the expedition on which Lord Byron ultimately met his death in Greece. Professor Rosen's penetrating study provides a new assessment of British philhellenism, and examines for the first time the relationship between Bentham's theory of constitutional government and the emerging liberalism of the 1820s. It breaks new ground in the history of political ideas and culture in the early nineteenth century. Professor Rosen advances striking new interpretations, based on recently published texts and manuscript sources, of the development of constitutional theory from Locke and Montesquieu, the conflicting strands of liberalism in the 1820s, and the response in Britain to strong claims for national self-determination in the Mediterranean basin. He sets out to distinguish between Bentham's theory and the ideological context against which it is usually interpreted. The result is a contribution as much to current debates over method in the study of political ideas as to the study of the history of political thought itself.

This edited volume compares the internal dimension, politics and society in Kurdistan-Iraq and Palestine. In particular, it focuses on internal processes in Kurdistan-Iraq and Palestine (Palestinian Territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip) in their specific shaping, development and transformation. The contributing authors analyze the transformation processes of the internal power structures, the economic basics, and the civil societies and provide an overview of the current political, economic and societal situation and challenges in both regions. The book presents the similarities and differences between both de facto states with regard to a set of guidelines: legitimacy, power relations, transformation of politics and society. It provides empirical explanations and contributes to a better understanding of both de facto states.

While globalization and the European construction increasingly undermine the model of the nation-state in the Mediterranean world, conversions reveal the capacity of religion to disrupt, and unsettle previous understandings of political and social relations. Converts' claims and practice are often met with the hostility of the state and the public while converts can often be perceived either as traitors or as unconscious and weak tools of foreign manipulation. Based on first-hand ethnographical research from several countries throughout the Mediterranean region, this book is the first of its kind in studying and analyzing contemporary conversions and their impact on recasting ideas of nationalism and citizenship. In doing so, this interdisciplinary study confronts historical, anthropological, political science and sociological approaches which offers an insight into the national, legal and political challenges of legislating for religious minorities that arise from conversions. Moreover, the specific examination of contemporary religious conversion contributes more widely to debates about the delinking of religion and culture, globalization, and secularism.

The 38 Croatian, Slovenian and Czech constitutional documents reflect the development of the modern national movements of these Middle and South East European Slavic peoples and their political and cultural efforts to emancipate themselves from the Habsburg monarchy around 1848. Here the two imperial a oeCabinet Letters for Bohemiaa Za are of particular importance for the Czech middle classes. For Croatia, the a oePetitions of Rights of the National Movement of the Triune Kingdom of Dalmatia, Croatia and Slavoniaa, and for Slovenia, the a oeProgramme of United Sloveniaa are of pre-eminent significance.

The United States has become increasingly polarized, although the concept of a two-party system is not new. This book traces the major parties' utter dominance--of the highest elected positions all the way down to "nonpartisan" political offices across the U.S.--from the founding of the Constitution through the 2020 presidential election. Even before the founding of the "modern" Republican Party in 1854 and the next 168-year era of Democratic-GOP dominance, the early decades of American nationhood were ruled in a similar manner by the two major parties of the day. This book is a comprehensive, fast-paced analysis of how the two-party system has grown to be such an affront to the ideals of the Founding Fathers and of the numerous Americans today who appear to accept it as a fact of life.

The book considers Australian First Nations constitutionalism by drawing on the chthonic constitutional traditions of three distinct Australian First Nations legal orders: the Warlpiri, Yolngu, and Pintupi legal orders, in the endeavour of identifying, via a comparative analysis, a core of similarities to be drawn upon and articulate an emergent legal theory common to the three legal orders. The comparative analysis is undertaken at the most foundational levels of their legal traditions, via the prism of a legal paradigm elaborated with reference to an Australian Indigenous cosmological, ontological, and epistemological standpoint. The proposed legal theory comprises a broad overview, general concepts, normative principles, and general working principles. In so doing, the book expounds how Australian First Nations constitutionalism unfolds into holistic orders of spiritual, political, and legal authority that are explainable in terms of legal theory. At the most foundational level, such elaboration may help delineate normative and legal constitutional patterns throughout Indigenous Australia.

This is an examination of the role and development of parliament throughout the Tudor period, now a central topic in the study of Tudor history. Jennifer Loach examines the constitutional position, political activities, and relationships of the two houses of parliament from the late Middle Ages until the accession of the Stuarts. She explores the growing importance of the Commons and examines the ways in which the Tudor monarchs, from Henry VII to Elizabeth I, attempted to exert their royal power. Topics covered include elections, patronage, and constitutional issues such as the succession to the throne; the fundamental part played by parliament in taxation and other financial matters; the social and economic background; and the vexed and vital question of religion. Thoroughly grounded in contemporary sources, this is a comprehensive and lucid account, which will be invaluable to students of Tudor history.

This book explores how a wide range of countries attempt to cope with the challenges of globalization. While the internalization of globalization proceeds in significantly different ways, there is a broad process of convergence taking place around the politics of neoliberalism and a more market-oriented version of capitalism. The book examines how distinct social structures, political cultures, patterns of party and interest group politics, classes, public policies, liberal democratic and authoritarian institutions, and the discourses that frame them, are being reshaped by political actors. Chapters cover national experiences from Europe and North America to Asia and Latin America (Chile, Mexico, and Peru).

Remember that metaphor about the frog that slowly cooks to death in the pot of increasingly warm water? Leftists have used it for years to describe how people can accept dwindling health care, fading job opportunities, eroding racial and gender equality--as long as the loss occurs gradually. Now, with Donald Trump having slouched off to Washington, most of the mainstream media are working overtime to convince us that we can still stand the heat. Leave it to John Bellamy Foster, one of the world's outstanding radical scholars, to expose Trump for who and what he is: a neo-fascist. Just at the boiling point, Foster offers us cool logic to comprehend the system that created Trump's moral and political emergency--and to resist it. In Trump in the White House, John Bellamy Foster does what no other Trump analyst has done before: he places the president and his administration in full historical context. Foster reveals that Trump is merely the endpoint of a stagnating economic system whose liberal democratic sheen has begun to wear thin. Beneath a veneer of democracy, we see the authoritarian rule that oversees decreasing wages, anti-science and climate-change denialism, a dying public education system, and expanding prisons and military--all powered by a phony populism seething with centuries of racism that never went away. But Foster refuses to end his book in despair. Inside his analysis is a clarion call to fight back. Protests, popular demands, coalitions: everyone is needed. Change can't happen without radical, anti-capitalist politics, and Foster demonstrates that--even now, with the waters ever warming--it may yet be possible to stop the desecration of the Earth; to end endless war; to create global solidarity with all oppressed people. Could a frog do that?

Is Bipartisanship Dead? looks beyond (and considers the time before) roll call voting to examine the extent to which bipartisan agreement in the House of Representatives has declined since the 1970s. Despite voting coalitions showing a decline in bipartisan agreement between 1973 and 2004, member's bill cosponsorship coalitions show a more stable level of bipartisanship. The declining bipartisanship over time in roll call voting reflects a shift in how party leaders structure the floor and roll call agendas. Party leaders in the House changed from prioritizing legislation with bipartisan agreement in the 1970s to prioritizing legislation with partisan disagreement by the 1990s. Laurel Harbridge argues that this shift reflects a changing political environment and an effort by leaders to balance members' electoral interests, governance goals, and partisan differentiation. The findings speak to questions of representation and governance. They also shed light on whether partisan conflict is insurmountable and whether bipartisanship in congressional politics is dead.

This study of five key policy areas, from welfare reform to foreign policy, demonstrates that the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition failed to fulfil its promise to reverse the rising power of the State. It exercised more subtle forms of 'soft power', often in partnership with the private sector, and to the detriment of ordinary citizens.