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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political structure & processes > Elections & referenda
Inspired by the democratic origins of the Greek naval victory at Salamis, the book discusses the current pressing issues of democracy worldwide. In 12 carefully selected chapters, well-renowned scholars from around the globe discuss topics such as Brexit, Euroscepticism, or the rise of populism. The authors further analyze various aspects of democracy, as well as various types of democratic regimes, such as mixed government, direct democracy, and cases of quasi democracies. While doing so, they relate this discussion to the pivotal question of how the quality of democracy today can be improved, seeking answers and solutions to current pending problems at the global level. This book is the second out of two edited volumes as a sequel of an international academic conference titled Salamis and Democracy: 2500 Years After that took place between October 3rd and October 5th, 2020, on the occasion of the 2500th anniversary of the great historical event of the Battle of Salamis, which saved Greek culture and the newly founded democratic regimes throughout the Hellenic world during the Classical period (508-323 BCE). The book is a must-read for scholars and students of political science, economics, and law, as well as policy-makers interested in a better understanding of democracy, governance, populism, social choice, and constitutional law.
Seib examines the ethical issues underlying the volatile relationship between journalists and politicians. It provides an inside look at how reporters and candidates do their jobs. From the screening process news organizations use to decide which candidates to cover, to the truth-testing of political ads, to the controversies surrounding election night projections, this work articulates crucial ethical questions and helps readers in their search for answers. As a political communications text, "Campaigns and Conscience" looks at the many facets of political journalism: what reporters need to know before covering a campaign; how to approach the character issue; how to keep up with the frantic pace of a campaign; why campaign ads should be covered as news; the allure and dangers of polls, projections, and endorsements; and the responsibility of the press to cover one of the most powerful quasi-political institutions--the press itself.
Since 1952, the social bases of the Democratic and Republican parties have undergone radical reshuffling. At the start of this period southern Blacks favored Lincoln's Republican Party over suspect Democrats, and women favored Democrats more than Republicans. In 2020 these facts have been completely reversed. A Tale of Two Parties: Living Amongst Democrats and Republicans Since 1952 traces through this transformation by showing: How the United States society has changed over the last seven decades in terms of regional growth, income, urbanization, education, religion, ethnicity, and ideology; How differently the two parties have appealed to groups in these social cleavages; How groups in these social cleavages have become concentrated within the bases of the Democratic and Republican parties; How party identification becomes intertwined with social identity to generate polarization akin to that of rapid sports fans or primitive tribes. A Tale of Two Parties: Living Amongst Democrats and Republicans Since 1952 will have a wide and enthusiastic readership among political scientists and researchers of American politics, campaigns and elections, and voting and elections.
Three critical problem areas in American politics involve the urban political machine, conflicting tensions among ethnic groups, and sexual discrimination. This study examines the dynamic interaction of all three factors in one political campaign.
Ten years into the "new" South Africa, how does democracy function?
This volume provides a retrospective on a decade of elections and
democracy in South Africa. The book analyzes the evolution of the
party system and electoral campaigns; tracks changes in public
opinion and voter motivations; assesses the political implications
of socioeconomic change; depicts the evolution of parliament and
the electoral system; probes the often-tense relationship between
media and government; analyzes the institutionalization the
Independent Electoral Commission; and, finally, argues that South
Africa is witnessing a "normalization" of politics. The book speaks
to a broad range of topics, all linked through the electoral theme,
which get to the heart of many issues in contemporary South African
politics.
This book provides a comprehensive mathematical description and analysis of the delegate allocation processes in the US Democratic and Republican presidential primaries, focusing on the role of apportionment methods and the effect of thresholds-the minimum levels of support required to receive delegates. The analysis involves a variety of techniques, including theoretical arguments, simplicial geometry, Monte Carlo simulation, and examination of presidential primary data from 2004 to 2020. The book is divided into two parts: Part I defines the classical apportionment problem and explains how the implementation and goals of delegate apportionment differ from those of apportionment for state representation in the US House of Representatives and for party representation in legislatures based on proportional representation. The authors then describe how delegates are assigned to states and congressional districts and formally define the delegate apportionment methods used in each state by the two major parties to allocate delegates to presidential candidates. Part II analyzes and compares the apportionment methods introduced in Part I based on their level of bias and adherence to various notions of proportionality. It explores how often the methods satisfy the quota condition and quantifies their biases in favor or against the strongest and weakest candidates. Because the methods are quota-based, they are susceptible to classical paradoxes like the Alabama and population paradoxes. They also suffer from other paradoxes that are more relevant in the context of delegate apportionment such as the elimination and aggregation paradoxes. The book evaluates the extent to which each method is susceptible to each paradox. Finally, it discusses the appointment of delegates based on divisor methods and notions of regressive proportionality. This book appeals to scholars and students interested in mathematical economics and political science, with an emphasis on apportionment and social choice theory.
Conservative journalist Allum Bokhari examines how the liberal-leaning elites of Silicon Valley have completely overtaken social media, creating a crisis for privacy and freedom of expression. In the beginning, the entrepreneurs who created the internet wanted to disrupt an old, oppressive system. They wanted to ensure that everyone -- no matter their social standing or level of education -- could have a voice. Today, those same entrepreneurs are in control, and they've created an oppressive system of their own. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are more powerful than most governments. They censor conservative voices. They ban content they don't like. They hide the profiles of users whose views don't align with their own. In #DELETED, Allum Bokhari tells the story of how this happened, and taps sources from deep in the government and several social media companies who are willing to speak out about it. The book includes several never-before-reported stories about censorship in big tech, and serves as a warning about what could happen if we don't do something about it.
Maurice Duverger is arguably the most distinguished French political scientist of the last century, but his major impact has, strangely enough, been largely in the English-speaking world. His book, Political Parties, first translated into English in 1954, has been very influential in both the party politics literature (which continues to make use of his typology of party organization) and in the electoral systems literature. His chief contributions there deal with what have come to be called in his honor Duverger s Law and Duverger s Hypothesis. The first argues that countries with plurality-based electoral methods will tend to become two-party systems; the second argues that countries using proportional representation (PR) methods will tend to become multi-party systems. Duverger also identifies specific mechanisms that will produce these effects, conventionally referred to as mechanical effects, and psychological effects . However, while Duverger s Hypothesis concerning the link between PR and multipartism is now widely accepted; the empirical evidence that plurality voting results in two-party systems is remarkably weak with the U.S. the most notable exception. The chapters in this volume consider national-level evidence for the operation of Duverger s law in the world s largest, longest-lived and most successful democracies of Britain, Canada, India and the United States. One set of papers involves looking at the overall evidence for Duverger s Law in these countries; the other set deals with evidence for the mechanical and incentive effects predicted by Duverger. The result is an incisive analysis of electoral and party dynamics."
First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Although nearly every country in the world today holds multiparty
elections, these contests are often blatantly unfair. For
governments, electoral misconduct is a tempting but also a risky
practice, because it represents a violation of Although nearly
every country in the world today holds multiparty elections, these
contests are often blatantly unfair. For governments, electoral
misconduct is a tempting but also a risky practice, because it
represents a violation of international standards for free and fair
elections. In Defending Democratic Norms, Daniela Donno examines
how international actors respond to these norm violations. Which
governments are punished for manipulating elections? Does
international norm enforcement make a difference? Donno shows that
although enforcement is selective and relatively rare, when
international actors do employ tools of conditionality, diplomacy,
mediation and shaming in response to electoral misconduct, they can
have transformative effects on both the quality and outcome of
elections. Specifically, enforcement works by empowering the
domestic opposition and increasing the government's incentives to
reform institutions of electoral management and oversight. These
effects depend, however, on the presence of a viable opposition
movement, as well as on the strength and credibility of the
enforcement effort itself. The book shows that regional
international organizations possess unique sources of leverage and
legitimacy that make them the most consistently effective norm
defenders, even compared to more materially powerful actors like
the United States.
In this text, historians and political scientists present a survey of the role and influence of by-elections in British politics since 1918.
There is a perceived North-South divide in British politics. In this study, William Field points out that this divide marks the resurgence of a core-periphery cleavage which was also dominant in British politics in the years before 1914. He shows how similar the geographical pattern of the vote was in the general election of 1989 to that in the two general elections of 1910, the last before the outbreak of World War I. Many of the same constitution issues - devolution and reform of the second chamber were coming to the fore then.
This is the first book-length analysis of the rise in power of the Bolivian party Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and its leader, President Evo Morales.
In this book, John Ehrenberg argues that Donald Trump, as both candidate and president, represents a qualitatively new stage in the evolution of the Republican Party's willingness to exploit American racial tensions. Works on Trump's use of race have tended to be fragmentary or subsidiary to a larger purpose. Ehrenberg concentrates his investigation on Trump's weaponized use of race, contextualized through historical and theoretical details, demonstrating that while Trump draws on previous Republican strategies, he stands apart through his explicit intention to convert the Republican Party into a political instrument of a threatened racial order. The book traces the Grand Old Party's (GOP) approach to racial matters from Goldwater's "constitutional" objection to federal activity in the South to George W. Bush's overtures to Black citizens. Ehrenberg examines the role of racial animus in prying loose a significant portion of the Democratic Party's electoral coalition and making possible Trump's overt flirtation with white nationalism. He concludes that the Republican Party will find it difficult to jettison its 50-year history of embracing and amplifying white racial animus and resentment. White Nationalism and the Republican Party will be of interest to academics and students of American politics, voting behavior, American party politics, race and American politics, twentieth-century American history, political leadership, politics of inequality, race and public policy.
This interdisciplinary volume presents a comprehensive framework to understand political awareness. Political awareness has become an important part of research on political attitudes and political behavior since the publication of John Zaller's work on political opinion. The authors elaborate on his theory and present a new conceptualization, which stipulates that political awareness is the attentiveness, knowledge, and understanding of politics. Hence, the book discusses different aspects, such as the concept of political awareness, its formation, significance, measurement, and exploration. The result is a new framework that addresses conceptual, theoretical, and methodological questions, such as: What does the concept mean? How to study political awareness? How is it connected to other orientations? How do children and youth develop political awareness? Addressing researchers and graduate students, as well as scholars in political science, sociology, and education, this book is a must-read for everybody interested in a better understanding of political awareness.
"Suffrage Days" is an account of the British suffrage movement from its inception until its victory in 1918. It is based around the experiences of seven individuals whose participation in the British suffrage movement is little-known: Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Jessie Craigen, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Hannah Mitchell, Mary Gawthorpe, Laurence Housman, and Alice Clark. Through their stories and perceptions Sandra Stanley Holton addresses issues such as: a previously unacknowledged Radical-Liberal current in the nineteenth century movemen; the transatlantic links between Radical suffragists; the national and international significance of the Women's Franchise League; some nineteenth century origins of suffrage militancy; the relationship between emergent new masculine identities and suffrage politics; and the complex relationship between militant and constitutional suffragists. In a final chapter Holton examines the historiography of the suffrage movement.
The British General Election of 2015 is a must-read for anyone wanting to know how the action unfolded in the most unpredictable election for a generation. Drawing on hundreds of confidential interviews with all the key players, it offers a compelling insider's guide to the election's background, campaign, and the results which led to the formation of the first majority Conservative government in eighteen years. Designed to appeal to everyone from Westminster insiders, politics students and the wider general public, this is the authoritative account of the 2015 election. Continuing a proud Palgrave Macmillan tradition, The British General Election of 2015 is the 19th edition and celebrates the 70th year of this prestigious series.
Televised debates between the nominees of the two major parties have become standard fare in contemporary presidential election campaigns. The authors of this important volume maintain that television has altered the very nature of presidential debates profoundly, that the demands of television have dictated the structure and formats of contemporary debates, and that the visual content of presidential debates plays an important role in the way that candidates exercise influence in televised debates. This important work employs a television perspective in examining the sponsorship, formats, nature, and impacts of presidential debates, stressing the 1960, 1976, 1980, 1984, and 1988 debates. The authors assert that in order to understand contemporary political debates, one must understand how television communicates and exercises influence in this context. Hellweg, Pfau, and Brydon integrate contemporary theory and research about the television medium and influence with extensive research on presidential debates. Specific topics include how presidential debates have evolved as a function of the participation of the broadcast industry, how debates are structured to fit the demands of the television medium, how candidates' verbal messages must be tailored to the medium, how candidates' visual messages are defined through the medium, and the persuasive effects of mediated debates. Televised Presidential Debates will be particularly useful to scholars and students of political communication, campaigns and elections, and mass media.
New Hampshire: First in the presidential primaries, it sets the stage and affects candidates' odds of success or failure. Every four years, this small, proudly distinctive state is the center of America's political universe. Candidates' performances, especially in comparison to expectations, influence the competition for the country's highest office. Scala explains the importance and peculiarities of New Hampshire, providing both historical context and insights, based on extensive interviews, into the tensions between local politics and the national agendas of candidates. New Hampshire's sympathy for reformist candidates has the paradoxical effect of jumpstarting the campaigns of those candidates least representative of voters nationally, and Scala explores the tremendous implications for presidential politics. Scala explains what it takes for candidates to make the Granite State a launching pad rather than a crash landing.
This book examines the reasons why young people vote. Viewing political behavior through a psychological lens, this book uses psychological developmental models to test the theory of political identity development and explain how and why young people vote. Rather than studying why young people do not vote, as the majority of the literature does, the book discusses the mechanisms and purpose behind youth voting. Themes of the text include identifying how political identities develop in young people, how leaders can contribute to identity development, and how we can explain differences between young Independents who will vote and those who will not. The first chapter engages the reader with the background for each theoretical element of the book and develops the argument for the book as a whole. Three major substantive chapters discuss and test the theories of political identity development, political leadership as identity role models, and how we misunderstand political independence by not taking into account why young people might choose to identify as an Independent. The final chapter discusses implications for upcoming elections and how this research might better inform people and institutions interested in increasing youth turnout to reformulate their approach. An overarching discussion of identity and the political components of identity development, this book will be of interest to political scientists studying public opinion and voting behavior, campaigns and elections, and political psychology, as well as practitioners such as civic engagement and youth voting groups who wish to engage young people in the political process.
In light of the increased utilization of information technologies, such as social media and the 'Internet of Things,' this book investigates how this digital transformation process creates new challenges and opportunities for political participation, political election campaigns and political regulation of the Internet. Within the context of Western democracies and China, the contributors analyze these challenges and opportunities from three perspectives: the regulatory state, the political use of social media, and through the lens of the public sphere. The first part of the book discusses key challenges for Internet regulation, such as data protection and censorship, while the second addresses the use of social media in political communication and political elections. In turn, the third and last part highlights various opportunities offered by digital media for online civic engagement and protest in the public sphere. Drawing on different academic fields, including political science, communication science, and journalism studies, the contributors raise a number of innovative research questions and provide fascinating theoretical and empirical insights into the topic of digital transformation.
This handbook provides an empirically rich analysis of referendums in Europe from the end of the Second World War to the present. It addresses a range of perennial theoretical and legal questions that face policy-makers when they offer citizens the chance to take or influence decisions by referendum, not least whether to accept the 'will of the people'. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on historical, philosophical and political science perspectives, the book includes a contextual section on the history of referendums, the theoretical questions underpinning their use, and on constitutional and legal questions about the use of referendums. The empirical sections are divided into those referendums that focus on domestic issues, such as constitutional matters or questions of social policy, and those related to the European Union, including membership referendums and treaty ratification. |
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