The 1970s era of rapid change, economic and social, made constant demands on the adaptability of a constitutional system. The work of the State expanded, and the expansion was at several levels, delimited by the requirements of geography. Britain's constitutional system has two aspects: one essentially theoretical, concerning such questions as the nature of sovereignty, prerogative powers, and the rights and duties of citizens; the other concerning the way in which the business of government is carried on: how people who make political decisions are chosen, how their activities are subject to checks and influence by the representatives of public interests, formal and informal. Originally published in 1974, this book deals with the second of these aspects. It identifies the changes in constitutional practice which had taken place in the previous two decades, and the trends which could be discerned at the time. It has four main sections. The first deals with the changing structure of government itself: with the recruitment of ministers, the nature of political responsibility and the changes in government departments. The second section deals with both Houses of Parliament, and particularly with the new forms of parliamentary discussion and criticism. The third deals with the process of election, including the regulation of propaganda and the use of the mass media. The final section deals with the different levels of government, including the local, the regional and the supra-national. All through the main concern is with the dynamic aspects of the political constitution. This was a really up-to-date and realistic book on British government at the time and now can be read in its historical context.

As America continues down its path of polarization, a celebrated journalist tells us the deep story of the red-state/blue-state divide In the wake of Trump's presidency, Republican-led states have joined in an alarming assault on our democratic system. But the drift toward authoritarianism in red states has far deeper roots. We now have a country where tens of millions of people live under regimes that have spent years starving education and health care, empowering polluters, engaging in voter suppression, and neglecting their citizens' well-being in the interest of cutting taxes for the wealthy. In States of Neglect, journalist William Kleinknecht surveys the landscape of neglect in states including Texas, Florida, and Arizona through the experiences of a rich cast of characters. He visits environmental dead zones in the Texas Gulf region. He investigates Arizona's abandonment of public education and its corrupt charter school industry. He shows how Mississippi's denuded health care system has made the Magnolia State the sickest in the nation. And he explains how North Carolina allows its people to sink into poverty while catering to the needs of corporations. As a postscript, Kleinknecht proposes how progressive states on either coast might join in a compact of "progressive federalism" that uses their superior economic and cultural resources to counter the influence of the far right.

This empirically rich volume presents a holistic picture of the electoral process in Indian states and the return of the BJP to power. Drawing on the 2019 elections, it presents ground-level data to understand various aspects of elections: the nature of campaigning, caste, class and identity politics, electoral issues, poll strategies of different parties in the fray, electoral issues, electoral verdicts, the contestants, the leadership factor, the formation of government, among other empirical details. The essays underline the determinants of electoral behaviour by looking into the correlation between the background variables of voters and their voting choices. The essays also compare and contrast the 2019 election verdicts from the earlier elections held in the state under study. A long view of Indian state politics, this book will be essential reference for scholars and researchers of politics, especially political processes, and South Asian studies.

This book documents the history of China's attempts to undermine Taiwan's elections, offering additional insights into China's methods of influence in Hong Kong, the United States and Canada. Drawing from Chinese language primary sources and historical accounts, Taiwan is presented as a growing democracy that has had to endure constant threats to its way of democratic life from the People's Republic of China (China). Examining China's election interference operations and several previously undocumented instances of Chinese interference, chapters in this book not only cover traditional methods of influence such as diplomacy, economic policy, and military intimidation, but also an array of novel practices involving organized crime, religion, and the media. Conceptual and practical ideas have been developed for studying and combatting election interference, which will particularly appeal to policy makers and security professionals seeking to better identify instances of ongoing election interference and the motivations driving this phenomenon. Chinese Election Interference in Taiwan's National Elections will prove an innovative resource to students and scholars of international relations and Chinese studies, including history and politics.

A New Statesman Book of the Year "America's greatest historian of democracy now offers an extraordinary history of the most bizarre aspect of our representative democracy-the electoral college...A brilliant contribution to a critical current debate." -Lawrence Lessig, author of They Don't Represent Us Every four years, millions of Americans wonder why they choose their presidents through an arcane institution that permits the loser of the popular vote to become president and narrows campaigns to swing states. Congress has tried on many occasions to alter or scuttle the Electoral College, and in this master class in American political history, a renowned Harvard professor explains its confounding persistence. After tracing the tangled origins of the Electoral College back to the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Keyssar outlines the constant stream of efforts since then to abolish or reform it. Why have they all failed? The complexity of the design and partisan one-upmanship have a lot to do with it, as do the difficulty of passing constitutional amendments and the South's long history of restrictive voting laws. By revealing the reasons for past failures and showing how close we've come to abolishing the Electoral College, Keyssar offers encouragement to those hoping for change. "Conclusively demonstrates the absurdity of preserving an institution that has been so contentious throughout U.S. history and has not infrequently produced results that defied the popular will." -Michael Kazin, The Nation "Rigorous and highly readable...shows how the electoral college has endured despite being reviled by statesmen from James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson to Edward Kennedy, Bob Dole, and Gerald Ford." -Lawrence Douglas, Times Literary Supplement

What explains variance in presidential power between countries? In Presidential Power in Latin America, Dan Berbecel provides a general, systematic theory for explaining presidential power in practice as opposed to presidential power in theory. Using expert survey data from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) alongside interviews with high-level figures in politics, the judiciary, the public administration, NGOs, and academia in Argentina and Chile, Berbecel argues that constitutional presidential power (formal power) is a very poor predictor of presidential power in practice (informal power). Given the poor predictive value of formal rules, he provides an explanation why hyperpresidentialism emerges in some countries but not in others. Berbecel attributes the root causes of hyperpresidentialism to three independent variables (the strength of state institutions, the size of the president's party in congress, and whether or not the country has a history of economic crises) which together determine how likely it is that a president will be able to concentrate power. Presidential Power in Latin America will be of key interest to scholars and students of executive politics, Latin American politics, and more broadly, comparative politics.

The research in this book will be of interest to scholars of Congress and campaigns & elections. It follows in a distinguished line of work on candidate emergence and adds new data of interest, and provides in-depth treatment of a central but specialized topic in the congressional elections literature. The book could also find some adoption as a supplementary text for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in elections, although the reviews support the book primarily as a research monograph. Measuring and assessing candidate quality is a challenging feat to accomplish, and the author has undertaken to do this in a fresh and compelling way. To quote from Review E, "This book is by far the best effort I have seen at quantifying CQ, its impact on electoral outcomes, and fluctuations and trends in its incidence." Author is an important and respected scholar of elections in the United States, co-author of Routledge's A Citizen's Guide to U.S. Elections (2015) and editor of Strategy, Money and Technology in the 2008 Presidential Election (Routledge 2011).

The unmissable inside story of the most dramatic general election campaign in modern history and Theresa May's battle for a Brexit deal, the greatest challenge for a prime minister since the Second World War. By the bestselling author of All Out War, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2017. This is the unmissable inside story of the most dramatic general election campaign in modern history and Theresa May's battle for a Brexit deal - the greatest challenge for a prime minister since the Second World War. Fall Out tells of how a leader famed for her caution battled her bitterly divided cabinet at home while facing duplicitous Brussels bureaucrats abroad. Of how she then took the biggest gamble of her career to strengthen her position - and promptly blew it. It is also a tale of treachery where - in the hour of her greatest weakness - one by one, May's colleagues began to plot against her. Inside this book you will find all the strategy, comedy, tragedy and farce of modern politics - where principle, passion and vaulting ambition collide in the corridors of power. It chronicles a civil war at the heart of the Conservative Party and a Labour Party back from the dead, led by Jeremy Corbyn, who defied the experts and the critics on his own side to mount an unlikely tilt at the top job. With access to all the key players, Tim Shipman has written a political history that reads like a thriller, exploring how and why the EU referendum result pitched Britain into a year of political mayhem.

Stephen K. Medvic's Campaigns and Elections is a comprehensive yet compact core text that addresses two distinct but related aspects of American electoral democracy: the processes that constitute campaigns and elections, and the players who are involved. In addition to balanced coverage of process and actors, it gives equal billing to both campaigns and elections and covers contests for legislative and executive positions at the national, state, and local levels, including issue-oriented campaigns of note. The book opens by providing students with the conceptual distinctions between what happens in an election and the campaigning that precedes it. Significant attention is devoted to setting up the context for these campaigns and elections by covering the rules of the game in the American electoral system as well as aspects of election administration and the funding of elections. Then the book systematically covers the actors at every level-candidates and their organizations, parties, interest groups, the media, and voters-and the macro-level aspects of campaigns such as campaign strategy and determinants of election outcomes. The book concludes with a big-picture assessment of campaign ethics and implications of the "permanent campaign." New to the Fourth Edition: * Fully updated through the 2020 elections, looking ahead to the 2022 midterms * Covers the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2020 election as well as the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol * Adds new sections in Chapter 3 on election integrity and the assessment of election administration * Reviews recent Supreme Court cases on gerrymandering and faithless electors * Expands coverage of social media as a source of news, of the increasingly partisan nature of the media, and of the role of media fact-checking in campaigns and elections * Reorganizes the chapters on the various actors so that the chapter on candidates leads directly to the chapter on campaigns * Fully updates the resources listed at the end of each chapter

Stephen K. Medvic's Campaigns and Elections is a comprehensive yet compact core text that addresses two distinct but related aspects of American electoral democracy: the processes that constitute campaigns and elections, and the players who are involved. In addition to balanced coverage of process and actors, it gives equal billing to both campaigns and elections and covers contests for legislative and executive positions at the national, state, and local levels, including issue-oriented campaigns of note. The book opens by providing students with the conceptual distinctions between what happens in an election and the campaigning that precedes it. Significant attention is devoted to setting up the context for these campaigns and elections by covering the rules of the game in the American electoral system as well as aspects of election administration and the funding of elections. Then the book systematically covers the actors at every level-candidates and their organizations, parties, interest groups, the media, and voters-and the macro-level aspects of campaigns such as campaign strategy and determinants of election outcomes. The book concludes with a big-picture assessment of campaign ethics and implications of the "permanent campaign." New to the Fourth Edition: * Fully updated through the 2020 elections, looking ahead to the 2022 midterms * Covers the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2020 election as well as the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol * Adds new sections in Chapter 3 on election integrity and the assessment of election administration * Reviews recent Supreme Court cases on gerrymandering and faithless electors * Expands coverage of social media as a source of news, of the increasingly partisan nature of the media, and of the role of media fact-checking in campaigns and elections * Reorganizes the chapters on the various actors so that the chapter on candidates leads directly to the chapter on campaigns * Fully updates the resources listed at the end of each chapter

At a time when populism and appeal for national and popular sovereignty are on the rise - in Europe, the USA, and beyond - this volume proposes a new research agenda in political science that focuses on the linkages between populist and sovereignism in Europe. The book's core question is to know and describe whether, how, and to what extent populism has been able to articulate the calls for 'taking back control' of the national borders and authority, by looking at both the 'demand' and 'supply' sides. Through compelling empirical analyses, the authors offer fresh data and theoretical insights on the determinants of the support for sovereigntist claims and its impact on voting choices, as well as on the features of the sovereignist discourse in populist parties. Coupled with the growing electoral success of party-based populism, sovereignism actually poses challenges to the ongoing processes of supranational integration. This urges a timely rethinking of democratic politics and calls for far-sighted alternatives to 'taking back control' to address the impact of globalisation and regionalisation on contemporary societies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, European Politics and Society.

This book examines the politics involved in the mobilization of the Latinx vote in America. Delving into the questions of race and identity formation in conjunction with the role of communication media, the author discusses the implications for Latinx voters and their place in the American political and racial system. Utilizing an in-depth study of the mobilizing efforts of national Latinx groups, along with a rigorous analysis of online media, news media, and electoral results, this book discusses: How the old notions of white and black America clash with the growing focus on Latinos How political organizers develop and use messages of racial solidarity to motivate people, what technologies are at their disposal, and what their use means How the study of new media is vital to exploring race in the 21st century, and why communication cannot ignore the racial legacies of the 20th century Theoretically located in between the fields of communication and racial/ethnic studies, this book will be of great relevance to scholars and students working in the field of communication studies, political communication, Latinx studies, and sociology.

Since the election of President Hugo Chavez in 1998, Venezuela has become an important news item. Western coverage is shaped by the cultural milieu of its journalists, with news written from New York or London by non-specialists or by those staying inside wealthy guarded enclaves in an intensely segregated Caracas. Journalists mainly work with English-speaking elites and have little contact with the poor majority. Therefore, they reproduce ideas largely attuned to a Western, neoliberal understanding of Venezuela. Through extensive analysis of media coverage from Chavez's election to the present day, as well as detailed interviews with journalists and academics covering the country, Bad News from Venezuela highlights the factors contributing to reportage in Venezuela and why those factors exist in the first place. From this examination of a single Latin American country, the book furthers the discussion of contemporary media in the West, and how, with the rise of 'fake news', their operations have a significant impact on the wider representation of global affairs. Bad News from Venezuela is comprehensive and enlightening for undergraduate students and research academics in media and Latin American studies.

This book examines electoral politics in the state of Punjab, India as it has evolved since the colonial period. It underlines the emergence of the state as a singular unit for electoral analysis in the last three decades. This book: Charts the common trends and developments that have dominated politics in Punjab, and those that continue to play an important role in the government of the state; Examines state parties and their leadership in the context of party alliances, campaigns and electoral verdicts; Presents a comparative study of the assembly and Lok Sabha elections held in the state after reorganisation in 1966 with the objective of highlighting differences in electoral issues taken up by the parties. An important intervention in the study of state-level politics in India, this book will be of great interest to students and researchers of politics, especially comparative politics and political institutions, political sociology and social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

This book demonstrates how Barack Obama charted a new course for Democrats by staking out claims among moderate-conservative faith communities and emerged victorious in the presidential contest, in part by promoting a new Democratic racial-ethnic and religious pluralism.

Across Western Europe, the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath not only brought economic havoc but also, in turn, intense political upheaval. Many of the political manifestations of the crisis seen in other Western and especially Southern European countries also hit Spain, where challenger parties caused unprecedented parliamentary fragmentation, resulting in four general elections in under four years from 2015 onwards. Yet Spain, a decentralised state where extensive powers are devolved to 17 regions known as 'autonomous communities', also stood out from its neighbours due to the importance of the territorial dimension of politics in shaping the political expression of the crisis. This book explains how and why the territorial dimension of politics contributed to shaping party system continuity and change in Spain in the aftermath of the financial crisis, with a particular focus on party behaviour. The territorial dimension encompasses the demands for ever greater autonomy or even sovereignty coming from certain parties within the historic regions of the Basque Country, Catalonia and, to a lesser extent, Galicia. It also encompasses where these historic regions sit within the broader dynamics of intergovernmental relations across Spain's 17 autonomous communities in total, and how these dynamics contribute to shaping party strategies and behaviour in Spain. Such features became particularly salient in the aftermath of the financial crisis since this coincided with, and indeed accelerated, the rise of the independence movement in Catalonia.

From the legendary journalist and creator of "Gonzo" journalism Hunter S. Thompson comes the bestselling critical look at Nixon and McGovern's 1972 presidential election.
Forty years after its original publication, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 "remains a cornerstone of American political journalism and one of the bestselling campaign books of all time. Hunter S. Thompson's searing account of the battle for the 1972 presidency--from the Democratic primaries to the eventual showdown between George McGovern and Richard Nixon--is infused with the characteristic wit, intensity, and emotional engagement that made Thompson "the flamboyant apostle and avatar of gonzo journalism" ("The New York Times"). Hilarious, terrifying, insightful, and compulsively readable, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 "is an epic political adventure that captures the feel of the American democratic process better than any other book ever written.

This book explores the effect of the judiciary on the incidence of post-election violence by political actors across Africa and within African countries. It examines how variation in judicial independence can constrain or incentivize election violence among democratizing states. Using case studies and cross-national analysis, the book shows that variation in levels of judicial independence from a non-independent judiciary to a quasi-independent judiciary or from a fully independent judiciary to quasi-independent judiciary increases the likelihood of strategic use of post-election violence by non-state actors. However, the likelihood of post-election violence is significantly reduced in non-independent judiciaries or once countries' judiciaries become fully independent. The author makes the theoretical argument that, within unconsolidated states, non-state actors that view the judiciary as semi-independent are more likely to engage in post-election violence with the purpose of creating political and professional uncertainty in order to influence assertive behaviour from judges in disputed elections. Consequently, the book argues that semi-independent judiciaries or judiciaries that are neither fully controlled by the incumbent nor fully independent from the incumbent can help explain post-election violence among unconsolidated states, all else being equal. This book will be of interest to scholars of election violence, democratic politics, law and politics and African politics.

This book looks at different dimensions of political participation of women voters in India. Elections in India have witnessed an increasing electoral participation of women, both as political actors and as voters. Taking note of this positive development, the book looks at what has contributed to this increased turnout among women voters in Indian elections and discusses in detail the factors that facilitate or hinder this participation. Drawing on empirical data from 11 Indian states, it looks at key issues like the voting behaviour and political activities of Indian women; individual and motivational factors affecting participation; the political socialization of women at home; the role of internalized patriarchy and political opinions; along with the challenges faced by women in attaining representation in Indian politics. An important contribution in the study of voting patterns, this book will be indispensable to scholars and researchers of political studies, women's studies, gender studies, sociology, Indian politics, political sociology, voting behaviour and South Asian studies. It will also be useful for journalists and activists.

A History of British Elections since 1689 represents a unique single-volume authoritative reference guide to British elections and electoral systems from the Glorious Revolution to the present day. The main focus is on general elections and associated by-elections, but Chris Cook and John Stevenson also cover national referenda, European parliament elections, municipal elections, and elections to the Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies and the Scottish parliament. The outcome and political significance of all these elections are looked at in detail, but the authors also discuss broader themes and debates in British electoral history, for example: the evolution of the electoral system, parliamentary reform, women's suffrage, constituency size and numbers, elimination of corrupt practices, and other important topics. The book also follows the fortunes not only of the major political parties but of fringe movements of the extreme right and left. Combining data, summary and analysis with thematic overviews and chronological outlines, this major new reference provides a definitive guide to the long and varied history of British elections and is essential reading for students of British political history.

This book examines the representativeness of party membership and analyses the potential consequences of changing representativeness. Parties with high membership ratios, as well as those experiencing severe decline, are compared and examined across countries with varying constitutional arrangements and party systems. The book discusses whether changing representative capacities lead to declining political representation of (group) interests, less representative party candidate selection processes and declining legitimacy for the political system. The book bridges two subareas that are usually not in conversation with each other: literature on the decline of party membership and that on group representation (gender, ethnic minorities and other social groups). This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of party politics, political parties, representation and elections, and more broadly to people interested in European and comparative politics.

For a long time analyses of political parties were framed within the usual context of democracy and of the historical transformation of the forms of democratic government. More recently several authors, among which eminently Peter Mair, progressively began to question the relationship between the normative definition of democratic government and the actual operation of parties. These new concerns are well epitomized by the tension between 'responsiveness' and 'responsibility' that gives the title to this book. While classic democratic theory sees as desirable that parties in government (and in opposition, too) are sympathetically responsive to their supporters first and more generally to public opinion and, at the same time, responsible toward the internal and international systemic constraints and compatibilities, these two roles seem to have become more difficult to reconcile and even increasingly incompatible. The chapters of this book explore the tensions between responsiveness and responsibility decomposing the international sources from the domestic sources and discussing the options and the possibilities for political parties to continue to play the role of provider of political stability in rapidly changing domestic and international environments. This book was published as a special issue of West European Politics.

'This pioneering and judicious history of foreign intervention in elections should be read by everyone who wants to defend democracy now.' Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny The definitive account of covert operations to influence elections from the Cold War to 2016 - and why the threat is greater than ever in 2020. Russia's interference in 2016 marked only the latest chapter of a hidden and revelatory history. In Rigged, David Shimer tells the sweeping story of covert electoral interference past and present. He exposes decades of secret operations - by the CIA, the KGB, and Vladimir Putin's Russia - to shape electoral outcomes, melding deep historical research with groundbreaking interviews with more than 130 key players, from former CIA directors to a KGB general. What Americans should make of Russia's attack in 2016 is still hotly debated, even after the release of the Mueller Report and years of media coverage. Shimer shows that Putin's operation was, in fact, a continuation of an ongoing struggle, using familiar weapons radically enhanced by new technology. Casting aside partisanship and sensationalism, Rigged reveals new details about what Russia achieved in 2016, how the United States responded, and why Putin has also been interfering in elections across the globe in recent years. Understanding 2016 as one battle in a much longer war is essential to understanding the critical threat currently posed to America's electoral sovereignty and how to defend against it. Illuminating how the lessons of the past can be used to protect our democracy in the future, Rigged is an essential book for readers of every political persuasion.

This book analyses the determinants behind the openings in party leader selection rules (leaders' selectorate) in 10 Western European countries and more than 55 parties between the mid-1980s and the mid-2010s. Presenting a novel and revealing theoretical and empirical framework, it tackles the impact of party change and the personalisation of politics, specifically using data coming from the first expert survey on the personalisation of politics in Western Europe; the PoPES. A quantitative analysis is paired with more in-depth explorations of two Italian parties (the Italian Communist Party - Democratic Party of the Left; the Northern League) and the (missed) opening of their leader selectorate. This book highlights the critical importance of studying party leader selection rules against the backdrop of allegedly declining parties and rising party leaders and concludes by placing its findings in a broader discussion about the future of Western European party leaders. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political parties and party systems, leadership, political elites, elections, democracy, and more widely of Western European politics and comparative politics.

Right-wing populism is a global phenomenon that challenges several pillars of liberal democracy, and it is often described as a dangerous political ideology because it resonates with the fascist idea of power in terms of anti-pluralism and lack of minorities' protection. In Western Europe, many political actors are exploiting the fears and insecurities linked to globalization, economic crisis, and mass migrations to attract voters. However, while right-wing populist discourses are mainstream in certain countries, they are almost completely taboo in others. Why is right-wing populism so successful in Italy, Austria, and France while in Germany it is marginal and socially unacceptable? It is because each country developed a certain collective memory of the fascist past, which stigmatizes that past to different levels. For this reason, right-wing populism can find favorable conditions to thrive in certain countries, while in others it is considered as an illegitimate and dangerous idea of power. Through a comparative study of eight European countries, this book shows that short-term factors linked to levels of corruption, economic situation, and quality of democracy interact with long-term cultural elements and collective memories in determining the social acceptability of right-wing populist discourses.