The success of fascist and communist regimes has long been explained by their ability to turn political ideology into a type of religion. These innovative essays explore the notion that all forms of modern mass-politics, including democracies, need a form of sacralization to function.

In the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, the government of the Islamic Republic initiated a stringent anti-drug campaign that included fining addicts, imprisonment, physical punishment, and even the death penalty. Despite these measures, drug use was, and is still, commonplace. Based on her most recent fieldwork, Janne Bjerre Christensen explores the mounting problems of drug use in Iran, how treatment became legalized in 1998, how local NGOs offer methadone treatment in Tehran and face continuous political challenges in doing so, and how drug use is critically discussed in Iranian media and cinema. "Drugs, Deviancy and Democracy in Iran" is thus a unique account of Iran's recent social and political history, drawing important conclusions about the complexity of state power, and the growing impact of civil society, vital for all those interested in Iran's history, politics, and society.

"An excellent analysis of the complex dynamics of inclusion in post-conflict societies: theoretically grounded, empirically rich, and with a well-informed set of policy-relevant insights and recommendations with implications far beyond the cases of Kosovo and Northern Ireland."Stefan Wolff, University of Birmingham, UK "Does the promotion of political accommodation between the contending parties in an ethno-nationalist conflict disadvantage other groups in society? This important question is at the heart of Michael Potter's nuanced study of post-settlement parliaments in Kosovo and Northern Ireland, in which he probes their record of representativeness, focusing on gender and ethnicity. His meticulous research, drawing on extensive fieldwork, shows that the domination of the parliaments by parties aligned to the conflict does indeed tend to marginalise other identities. His findings provide plenty of food for thought for practitioners in the field of conflict resolution. In particular, they underline the need for care in the design of institutional arrangements for deeply divided societies, so as to minimise potentially negative consequences that priority for accommodation and reconciliation may have for other issues and for the practice of inclusion."Adrian Guelke, Queen's University Belfast, UK "Identity is a central organising principle of politics in the 21st century. In this impressive book Michael Potter shows that a focus on gender and minority ethnic identities in newly-formed post-conflict assemblies provides a unique litmus test of the robustness of democratic politics. He analyses the cases of Kosovo and Northern Ireland with rigour and considerable insight. This book makes a highly original and lasting contribution to theory and practice in post-conflict settings world-wide."Yvonne Galligan, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland This book examines inclusion in post-conflict legislatures, using Northern Ireland and Kosovo as case studies and gender and minority ethnicity as indicators. The analysis uses an adapted framework developed by Yvonne Galligan and Sara Clavero to measure inclusion across a range of factors associated with deliberative democratic principles. The logic is that political systems designed to accommodate communities in conflict will prioritise certain identities over others. The aim of the book is to investigate how identities not directly associated with a conflict fare in a political system designed to manage identities in conflict. The book looks comparatively at the conflicts in Kosovo and Northern Ireland, then discusses approaches to conflict management, describing how political institutions were designed in those contexts. The themes of women and minority identities in those conflicts are then explored with a view to examining the extent of inclusion in the Northern Ireland and Kosovo Assemblies.

Political constitutions alone do not guarantee democracy; a degree of economic equality is also essential. Yet contemporary economies, dominated as they are by global finance and political rent-seekers, often block the realization of democracy. The comparative essays and case studies of this volume examine the contradictory relationship between the economy and democracy and highlight the struggles and visions needed to make things more equitable. They explore how our collective aspirations for greater democracy might be informed by serious empirical research on the human economy today. If we want a better world, we must act on existing social realities.

The common assumption is that the path to democratisation is, once begun, near impossible to reverse. Particularly where democratic transition has been properly consolidated conventional wisdom and empirical evidence both suggest that no democracy should follow the example of Classical Athens or Germany's Weimar Republic and return to despotism. Starting from the premise that democracies are often deeply implicated in their own downfall, Theorising Democide challenges this conventional view by showing how democratic collapse is symptomatic of the inherent logic of democracy. Democide, in some cases, can thus be understood as a kind of ideological suicide with the tenets and devices of democracy being somehow intrinsic to its own collapse. In other words democide denotes the capacity that democracy has to come undone, to risk its own safety, to take its own life while doing what it was intended to do.

This book interrogates Africa's pursuit of the Democratic Developmental State model by drawing on the experiences of Mauritius, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. It comprises of five parts: Part I, consisting of two chapters, outlines the key conceptual and theoretical approaches used throughout the book's discussions. The proceeding parts II, III and IV critically analyses the three case studies under review. Each part is subdivided into two chapters wherein a historical state-societal approach is employed in interrogating the extent to which Mauritius, Ethiopia, and Rwanda have been able to successfully achieve democratic development, on the one hand, and, conversely, inclusive economic growth and development, on the other. Part V, and Chapter 10 debuts the concept and model of the Developmental Civil Society.

The Metamorphosis of Leadership in a Democratic Mexico is a broad analysis of Mexico's changing leadership over the past eight decades, stretching from its pre-democratic era (1935-1988), to its democratic transition (1988-2000) to its democratic period (2000-the present). In it, Roderic Camp, one of the most distinguished scholars of Mexican politics, seeks to answer two questions: 1) how has Mexican political leadership evolved since the 1930s and in what ways, beyond ideology, has the shift from a semi-authoritarian, one-party system to a democratic, electoral system altered the country's leadership? and 2) which aspects of Mexican leadership have been most affected by this shift in political models and when and why did the changes in leadership occur? Rather than viewing Mexico's current government as a true democracy, Camp sees it as undergoing a process of consolidation, under which the competitive electoral process has resulted in a system of governing institutions supported by the majority of citizens and significant strides toward plurality. Accordingly, he looks at the relationship between the decentralization of political power and the changing characteristics, experiences and paths to power of national leaders.
The book, which represents four decades of Camp's work, is based upon a detailed study of 3000 politicians from the 1930s through the present, incorporating regional media accounts and Camp's own interviews with Mexican presidents, cabinet members, assistant secretaries, senators, governors, and party presidents.

Recent events throughout Latin America have placed issues of democracy on centerstage. Collected here for the first time are articles that evaluate different models of democracy, challenging the realities and myths of the practice of democracy in various countries throughout the region. This is a provocative and revealing study of the critical issues in the struggle for democracy and current events in the Third World and the United States. Through the writings of leading Latin American and U.S. scholars, including James Petras, Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, and Max Azicri, the book addresses such important topics as whether Washington's model democracies are truly democratic, and how Guatemala's civilian regime compares to Nicaragua's revolutionary democracy. By covering countries as diverse as Cuba, Argentina, and Guatemala, the collection adds to an understanding of different models of democracy and challenges traditional methodologies used to evaluate them. Several essays put the issue of democratization in the context of economic crisis, resulting in political redefinitions, and the emergence of the new social movements. The book includes a foreword and introduction by the editors, and concludes with a comprehensive index. It will be a useful resource for courses in political science and Latin American history, and an important addition to college, university, and public libraries.

From its origins in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the diffusion of participatory budgeting to other parts of the world has been met with varying degrees of success despite its label as a product of democratic innovation. Drawing on in-depth empirical and theoretical analysis, this book sheds light on the diffusion dynamics of participatory budgeting and the processes of its framing and adaptation in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It explores the question of participatory budgeting's national characteristics and potential for realising a more democratic society. Thus, the volume engages in a theoretically innovative and empirically grounded overview and critical assessment of participatory budgeting initiatives in three European countries. The double focus on frames in the diffusion and implementation of single cases and the systematic evaluation of their results offers a deeper understanding of "success factors" and results of participatory budgeting and other institutional processes of citizen participation.

Instant New York Times Bestseller Washington Post Bestseller USA Today Bestseller Indie Bound Bestseller Authors Round the South Bestseller Midwest Indie Bestseller New York Times bestselling author Sarah Kendzior documents the truth about the calculated rise to power of Donald Trump since the 1980s and how the erosion of our liberties made an American dema-gogue possible. The story of Donald Trump's rise to power is the story of a buried American history - buried because people in power liked it that way. It was visible without being seen, influential without being named, ubiquitous without being overt. Sarah Kendzior's Hiding in Plain Sight pulls back the veil on a history spanning decades, a history of an American autocrat in the making. In doing so, she reveals the inherent fragility of American democracy - how our continual loss of freedom, the rise of consolidated corruption, and the secrets behind a burgeoning autocratic United States have been hiding in plain sight for decades. In Kendzior's signature and celebrated style, she expertly outlines Trump's meteoric rise from the 1980s until today, interlinking key moments of his life with the degradation of the American political system and the continual erosion of our civil liberties by foreign powers. Kendzior also offers a never-before-seen look at her lifelong tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time - living in New York through 9/11 and in St. Louis during the Ferguson uprising, and researching media and authoritarianism when Trump emerged using the same tactics as the post-Soviet dictatorships she had long studied. It is a terrible feeling to sense a threat coming, but it is worse when we let apathy, doubt, and fear prevent us from preparing ourselves. Hiding in Plain Sight confronts the injustice we have too long ignored because the truth is the only way forward.

Tadjoeddin uniquely explores four types of violent conflicts pertinent to contemporary Indonesia (secessionist, ethnic, routine-everyday and electoral violence), and seeks to discover what socio-economic development can do to overcome conflict and make the country's transition to democracy safe for its constituencies.

In one of the first attempts to link the expanding field of leadership studies with classic works in political theory, Kenneth Ruscio places the study of political leadership squarely within the field of democratic thought and argues that claims about the legitimate duties and responsibilities of leaders depend upon claims about principles of democracy.It is impossible to imagine effective democracies without effective leaders. Yet leaders are often seen as the problem democratic governance is designed to solve, not the solution. Through a careful but lively critique of some of the classic works in modern democratic thought - from Machiavelli to Locke and from The Federalist Papers to Rawls - The Leadership Dilemma in Modern Democracy explains what is meant by effective political leadership in a system and culture of government where the power and discretion of leaders are severely limited. A compelling and provocative study, this volume will be of interest to scholars of leadership studies, political scientists, democratic theorists, and all those interested in concepts of democracy and the challenges faced by leaders.

Hu seeks to explain China's failure to establish a democratic system. He demonstrates both continuity and change in China's democratization process. Modern China regards power and wealth as primary goals and treats a strong state as a major means to these ends. Such a preference puts democracy on a back burner.

Employing a theoretical framework which consists of five factors--historical legacies, local forces, the world system, socialist values, and economic development--Hu shows that, while all of these factors were at work in all eras, each assumes a special significance in a particular period. Traditional China before the 1911 Revolution attempted to adjust itself to a new, Western-dominated world. In the Republican era, the control of local forces topped the political agenda. Nationalist China sought to survive and develop in the world system, while Maoist China set for itself the task of building a socialist state. And, of course, economic development has been the priority of the Deng era. As Hu shows, these five factors have had determining impacts on the long struggle for democracy in China.

Democratic Ideals and the Politization of Nature introduces the feral citizen as a response to a perceived need to revitalize the disruptive, critical, and exploratory nature of democratic culture. By learning from the traditions of aimless walking and by embracing a consciously feral method of political engagement, radically-democratic citizens can prompt political moments that create conditions where the primacy of the political can be performed, realized and defended. Ultimately, this book seeks not to solve the problems and paradoxes of democracy but to assist in unleashing and celebrating them. Garside concludes that using the methodology of feral citizenship - inspired by environmentalism and democratic articulation - to reprioritize the political within the green public sphere, citizens can reclaim necessary (and welcome) tensions between representations of nature and political citizenship.

This work is a collection of essays relating to social and economic, leadership, and ethics, ecological and religious issues that are facing the world today in order to understand the course of history that has led humanity to its present condition and then arrive at positive solutions that will lead to better outcomes for all humanity. It surveys the development and decline of major empires throughout history and focuses on the creation of American Empire along with the social, political and economic policies that led to the prominence of the United States of America as a Superpower including the rise of the political control of the neo-con political philosophy including militarism and the military industrial complex in American politics and the rise of the religious right into and American Theocracy movement. This volume details, through historical and current events, the psychology behind the dominance of western culture in world politics through the "Superpower Syndrome Mandatory Conflict Complex" that drives the Superpower culture to establish itself above all others and then act hubristically to dominate world culture through legitimate influences as well as coercion, media censorship and misinformation leading to international hegemony and world conflict. This volume also details the financial policies that gave rise to American prominence in the global economy, especially after World War II, and promoted American preeminence over the world economy through Globalization as well as the environmental policies, including the oil economy, that are promoting degradation of the world ecology and contribute to the decline of America as an Empire culture. This volume finally explores thefactors pointing to the decline of the American Empire economy and imperial power and what to expect in the aftermath of American prominence and how to survive the decline while at the same time promoting policies and social-economic-religious-political changes that are needed in order to promote the emergence of a beneficial and sustainable culture.

Faced with falling social cohesion governments have sought to revitalise society by trying to reconstruct local communities, civil society and citizenship. As a result, civil society is increasingly brought within the realm of public management, subject to accountability and embedded in hierarchies the impact and origins of which this book explores

The concept of democracy is fraught with ambiguity. There are none who know what democracy means, where it came from or indeed where it is going despite it being the system of governance that is most widely heralded for its modernity and promotion of equality. For example, the theory and principles that underpin democracy are unimaginably complicated while its institutions across time and space are contradictory. The stark reality is that democracy is imprisoned by parochialism, subjectivity and myopia with humanity being governed by a system that is does not fully understand. If democracy is everywhere and everyone wants it, then how do we not know what it means? If we do not know what democracy means, then why is it forcefully driving our politics and societies? This extremely ambitious and illuminating book offers a way out by answering these important questions and by exploring democracy in its purest form and as such has been nominated for the 2013 Stein Rokkan Prize.
Evolutionary Basic Democracy has been nominated for the 2013 Stein Rokkan prize. This extrememly presitgious award is presented by the International Social Science Council, The University of Bergen and the European Consortium for Political Research. For more details please click the link below.
http: //www.worldsocialscience.org/?page_id=78

This book is concerned with changes in the social structures, demographics, and issues in Western democracies along with the impact of those changes on party systems and policy outcomes. Three countries - the United States, the Netherlands, and Belgium - are examined to determine how they accommodate these changes. The United States is investigated as an example of a stable consolidated party system, the Netherlands is included as a representative fragmented parliamentary regime, and Belgium is an extreme example of a sub-culture alienated from the rest of the country. The conflict between the representation function and the function of forming a majority able to govern is stressed.

, The papers in this collection, written by a cross-regional group of experts, provide insights into the causes of declining levels of citizen participation and other distinct forms of civic activism in Europe and explore a range of factors contributing to apathy and eventually disengagement from vital political processes and institutions. At the same time, this volume examines informal or unconventional types of civic engagement and political participation corresponding to the rapid advances in culture, technology and social networking. The volume is divided into three interrelated parts: Part I consists of critical essays in the form of theoretical approaches to analysing weakening political participation and citizen estrangement; Part II is dedicated to an exploration of the role and deployment of technologically advanced media, such as the internet, as determinants of changing patterns of political participationist behaviour. Finally, Part III presents findings of empirical research on the issue of political participation. Combining theoretical and empirical perspectives, the book contributes towards a better understanding of the disquieting trend of voter apathy and disenchantment with politics in the context of the ongoing process of European integration, and offers a variety of analytical tools for decoding both the emergence of alternative conceptualizations of citizenship and other forms of meaningful civic and political engagement.

We live in a world governed by states whose enduring importance and domination of contemporary politics has been strikingly underlined by their renewed activism in the face of a global economic crisis. Yet the very nature of states remains deeply contested, with a range of competing theories offering very different views of how they actually do or should operate. In the past this competition has lead to deep ideological conflict - and even to war. In this major new work, John S. Dryzek and Patrick Dunleavy provide a broad-ranging assessment of classical and contemporary theories of the state, focusing primarily on the democratic state form that has come to dominate modern politics. The authors' starting point is the classical theories of the state: pluralism, elite theory, Marxism and market liberalism. They then turn to the contemporary forms of pluralism prevalent in political science, systematically exploring how they address central issues, such as networked governance, globalization, and changing patterns of electoral and identity politics. They proceed to analyse a range of key contemporary critiques of modern states and democracy that have emerged from feminism, environmentalism, neo-conservatism and post-modernism. Each approach is carefully introduced and analysed as far as possible in relation to a common set of issues and headings. Theories of the Democratic State takes the reader straight to the heart of contemporary issues and debates and, in the process, provides a challenging and distinctive introduction to and reassessment of contemporary political science.

State building and democratization in Africa rarely attract the attention they deserve. Few have grappled with the relationship between state building (nation-building) and democratic experiments in Africa. This collection consciously corrects this shortcoming in African political studies. Among the issues raised: Does democracy facilitate state building or does it exacerbate ethnic conflicts? Are certain modalities of democratization more likely to facilitate state-building than others? Has the era of democracy created the need for new state building strategies? Does the objective of state building require significant modifications in the essence and form of democracy? This collection combines theoretical explorations with empirical case studies. It looks at both anglophone and francophone countries of sub-Saharan Africa. While the contributors have written extensively on African issues, there is no consensus among the authors; most argue that integrating ethnic groups that already face discrimination and often are engaged in conflict requires compromise, political settlements, and new terms of incorporation into the state. These compromises, in turn, involve new arrangements in how democracy is perceived and instituted. An important collection for scholars, students, and other researchers involved with African political, social, and economic development.

An original investigation of the nature of the forces that make members and representatives both loyal and beneficial to a contemporary political party, this book combines theoretical reflection with interview and archive material to provide a unique perspective on power, arguing that it is more complex and nuanced than is frequently assumed.

Robert Weatherley examines the role of nationalism in Chinese thinking on democracy and human rights spanning four successive periods: the late Qing, the Republic, Mao's China and post-Mao China. During this time, many of the debates in China about democracy and rights have been tied to the question of how to make China strong. The trigger is usually a perceived threat from foreign imperialism. Following the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839, this imperialism took a military form, leading many Chinese reformers to embrace a system of democracy and rights in order to protect China from further foreign encroachments. In more recent years, the perceived threat has come from cultural imperialism, most apparent, Beijing claims, when the West criticises China for its poor record on democracy and human rights. This has led to the evolution of a distinctively Chinese model of democracy and rights that differs significantly from that deriving from the West.

This book examines the influence and activities of the Christian Right at the state level. One of the first attempts at studying the Christian Right comparatively across states, this book offers a new theoretically-driven perspective on how political context and constraints shape the Christian Right's strategy and influence. Based on evidence from in-depth case studies of three states - Indiana, Missouri, and Arizona - and qualitative and quantitative data from a wide variety of other states, its conclusions demonstrate that the movement's strategies and behavior are based on the political opportunity structure of each state, the movement's internal resources, and its ability to utilize threat-based mobilization.