Public disenchantment with and distrust of American government is at an all-time high and who can blame them? In the face of widespread challenges-everything from record levels of personal and national debt and the sky high cost of education, to gun violence, racial discrimination, an immigration crisis, overpriced pharmaceuticals, and much more-the government seems paralyzed and unable to act, the most recent example being Covid-19. It's the deadliest pandemic in over a century. In addition to an unimaginable sick and death toll, it has left more than thirty million Americans unemployed. Despite this, Washington let the first round of supplemental unemployment benefits run out and for more than a month were unable to agree on a bill to help those suffering. This book explains why we are in this situation, why the government is unable to respond to key challenges, and what we can do to right the ship. It requires that readers "upstream," stop blaming the individuals in office and instead look at the root cause of the problem. The real culprit is the system; it was designed to protect liberty and structured accordingly. As a result, however, it has left us with a government that is not responsive, largely unaccountable, and often ineffective. This is not an accident; it is by design. Changing the way our government operates requires rethinking its primary goal(s) and then restructuring to meet them. To this end, this book offers specific reform proposals to restructure the government and in the process make it more accountable, effective, and responsive.

Why do world powers sometimes try to determine who wins an election in another country? What effects does such meddling have on the targeted elections results? Great powers have attempted for centuries to intervene in elections occurring in other states through various covert and overt methods, with the American intervention in the 2013 Kenyan elections and the Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections being just two recent examples. Indeed, the Americans and the Soviets/Russians intervened in one out of every nine national-level executive elections between 1946 and 2000. Meddling in the Ballot Box is the first book to provide a comprehensive analysis of foreign meddling in elections from the dawn of the modern era to the 2016 Russian intervention in the US election. Dov Levin shows that partisan electoral interventions are usually an "inside job" occurring only if a significant domestic actor within the target wants it. Likewise, a great power will not intervene unless it fears that its interests are endangered by an opposing party or candidate with very different preferences. He also finds that partisan electoral interventions frequently have significant effects on the results-sufficient in many situations to determine the winner. Such interference also tends to be more effective when it is conducted overtly. However, it is usually ineffective, if not counterproductive, when done in a founding election. A revelatory account that explains why major powers have meddled so frequently across the entire postwar era, Meddling in the Ballot Box also provides us with a framework for assessing the cyber-future of interference.

Journalist and "Salon" writer Rebecca Traister investigates the 2008 presidential election and its impact on American politics, women and cultural feminism. Examining the role of women in the campaign, from Clinton and Palin to Tina Fey and young voters, Traister confronts the tough questions of what it means to be a woman in today's America.
The 2008 campaign for the presidency reopened some of the most fraught American conversations--about gender, race and generational difference, about sexism on the left and feminism on the right--difficult discussions that had been left unfinished but that are crucial to further perfecting our union. Though the election didn't give us our first woman president or vice president, the exhilarating campaign was nonetheless transformative for American women and for the nation. In "Big Girls Don't Cry," her electrifying, incisive and highly entertaining first book, Traister tells a terrific story and makes sense of a moment in American history that changed the country's narrative in ways that no one anticipated.
Throughout the book, Traister weaves in her own experience as a thirtysomething feminist sorting through all the events and media coverage--vacillating between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and questioning her own view of feminism, the women's movement, race and the different generational perspectives of women working toward political parity. Electrifying, incisive and highly entertaining, "Big Girls Don't Cry "offers an enduring portrait of dramatic cultural and political shifts brought about by this most historic of American contests.

For a whole generation of Malaysians, no proper closure to the traumas of the racial riots of May 13, 1969 has been possible. But then came March 8, 2008 The surprising results of the General Election on that special day have started eclipsing the fears linked for so long to that spectral night forty years ago. All the three researchers from ISEAS who each authored separate chapters for this book were in different parts of Malaysia monitoring its 12th General Election during the thirteen days of campaigning. Their analyses provide new insights into the phenomenon that Malaysians now simply refer to as "March 8." Ooi Kee Beng scrutinizes in detail the electoral campaign in the state of Penang, Johan Saravanamuttu studies the case of Kelantan state and the elections in general, while Lee Hock Guan examines changes in the voting pattern in the Klang Valley.

Este libro est contextualizado en un referente hist rico que analiza a trav?'s de datos, fechas y sucesos, el desarrollo del r gimen presidencial mexicano. As mismo, enuncia conceptos fundamentales de la pol tica actual, del comportamiento de los actores y de los partidos pol ticos que interact an en el contexto nacional. Adem s, refiere la percepci n e inter?'s que desde el escenario internacional han vertido diversos personajes sobre el pr ximo proceso sucesorio en nuestro pa s. Tambi n aborda lo trascendental del marketing pol tico para la elecci n del 1 de Julio; qu papel jugar n en las campa as el internet y la din mica de las redes sociales, donde hoy en d a j venes entre 18 y 25 a os de edad podr an constituirse como un detonante y definir los resultados de la jornada electoral en la renovaci n de 2,102 cargos de elecci n popular. Considerando que en M xico la red de internet cuenta con 36 millones de usuarios, de los cuales aproximadamente 10 millones son j venes, todos los partidos pol ticos en contienda deber n prestar atenci n prioritaria a este segmento poblacional, que sin lugar a dudas jugar un rol fundamental en el resultado de la elecci n presidencial. 78.7 millones de ciudadanos que est n inscritos en la lista nominal, podr n votar en esta elecci n. El reto para los equipos de campa a de todos los candidatos radica en dise ar estrategias id neas para despertar el inter?'s de los electores y de los posibles votantes que representan un importante n mero de ciudadanos indecisos. Por lo anterior, los institutos de representaci n pol tica nacional, no deben soslayar el fen meno del abstencionismo y analizar acuciosamente las condiciones sociodemogr ficas, hist ricas y estructurales que siempre han afectado los niveles de participaci n electoral. Adem?'s de proponer las nominaciones m?'s rentables y que presenten estas una buena imagen ante la opini n p blica. El acontecer pol tico actual, sin lugar a dudas ha motivado que haya una gran demanda y exigir ciudadano para que los pol ticos deban profesionalizarse con el fin de ganarse el respecto de la sociedad mexicana y la pol tica sea un verdadero instrumento de cambio democr tico que genere certidumbre en acciones de gobierno. Estimado lector (a), el libro que tienes en tus manos con toda seguridad ser un til instrumento que facilitar la toma de decisiones para emitir un voto razonado, anal tico y responsable en estas elecciones del 2012.

"Robert Alexander convincingly argues that presidential electors--long considered by many as inconsequential, if not benign--are a serious danger to the health of our representative democracy. In one of the first systematic studies of its kind, Alexander presents a theory of elector behavior that explains why electors will continue to plague the system unless we institute reform. This book is indispensable for a deeper understanding of the presidential electoral process." - Gary E. Bugh, Texas A&M University "Presidential Electors and the Electoral College is an eye opener. Robert Alexander's exhaustive research has revealed some surprising results about the arcane and, as some maintain, undemocratic Electoral College. The fact that many electors are lobbied to change their votes after the presidential election should serve as a warning that the Electoral College is a disaster waiting to happen--again." - Michael A. Genovese, Loyola Marymount University "Robert Alexander's Presidential Electors and the Electoral College is a valuable and much-needed examination of a long-neglected constitutional challenge. His analytical research is a serious contribution to our understanding of the Electoral College and its problems." - Thomas Cronin, Colorado College "Dr. Alexander has brought this very important history to life in a way that can help all of us look more carefully into the future. With lots of current public debate about the future of the Electoral College, this book provides a comprehensive and much-needed examination of one of the challenges that we have faced since the founding of our nation." - Mark Ritchie, Minnesota Secretary of State

The 2016 and 2018 elections are over, but looking ahead to the 2019-2020 election cycle, the debate over the fairness and accuracy of our electoral process has never been more contentious. Hacking, fake news, a "rigged system," voter ID challenges, Super PACs, and an Electoral College defying the popular vote count all lead to a common question and concern: Is this any way to run a democratic election? New to the Seventh Edition: New data and timely illustrations from the 2016 and 2018 elections, looking ahead to 2020 election. The growing importance of social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) and its impact, good and bad, on recent campaigns. Foreign interference in the 2016 and 2018 national elections. The integrity of campaign communications-hacking, rumoring, instantaneous news, and the effect of fact-checking. Money: the role of Super PACs and billionaire donors; the impact of campaign spending on the candidates and on election outcomes. New connections between the "Did you know that" chapter introductions to the exercises at the end. More online references in the suggested readings.

The biggest contemporary challenge to democratic legitimacy gravitates around the crisis of democratic representation. To tackle this problem, a growing number of established and new democracies included direct democratic instruments in their constitutions, enabling citizens to have direct influence on democratic decision-making. However, there are many different empirical manifestations of direct democracy, and their diverse consequences for representative democracy remain an understudied topic. Let the People Rule? aims to fill this gap, analysing the multifaceted consequences of direct democracy on constitutional reforms and issues of independence, democratic accountability mechanisms, and political outcomes. Chapters apply different methodological approaches to study the consequences of direct democracy on democratic legitimacy. These range from single in-depth case studies, like the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, to cross-national comparative studies, such as the direct democratic experience within the European Union.

La lucha por el poder en Mexico, es encarnizada y suele estar sazonada con descalificaciones, vituperios, infundios, y calumnias de la mas variada especie. Las trampas de cualquier indole, se ponen en juego y son tantos los artilugios utilizados, que es muy dificil encontrar el hilo de la madeja a tiempo para detenerlos u obstaculizarlos con la ley en la mano. Cuando se logran detectar las violaciones a la ley, es muy tarde para intentar, siquiera, revertir un resultado electoral emanado de actos delictivos, pues el tiempo requerido para documentarlos y evaluarlos es exageradamente largo. Un individuo cualquiera, inmiscuido en un proceso electoral en Mexico, puede violar la reglamentacion electoral de todas las formas que su imaginacion le dicte, tomar posesion de su cargo y despues enfrentar las acusaciones que se le imputen, desde la seguridad del fuero constitucional, pero nunca estara en riesgo el puesto obtenido de manera ilegal. Los expertos en cuestiones politicas, solo pueden mesarse los cabellos en actitud de impotencia y verter sus opiniones y sus puntos de vista en escritos dirigidos, por lo comun, a un restringido nucleo de lectores, que casi siempre es el mismo, porque a la mayoria de la gente no le interesa mayormente lo que ocurra despues de unas elecciones, ya sean locales o federales. Es un circulo vicioso muy dificil de romper; pero los analistas politicos raras veces se han preocupado porque sus opiniones lleguen al grueso de la poblacion. No tienen tiempo y tampoco les interesa demasiado, aunque ellos digan lo contrario. Una caracteristica comun, en la mayoria de los trabajos ensayisticos, es la frialdad de sus textos, derivada, en gran medida, de la rigidez tecnica con la que son abordados los temas que intenta retratar. Esta frialdad, esta rigidez, los hace poco atractivos a los ojos del lector impaciente, o del lector que no busca tanto el dato tecnico, preciso, sino la simple informacion que pueda servirle de referencia para enriquecer su propio punto de vista. " Por que perdimos?" Intenta conjugar el dato duro y la calidez de un texto, escrito con la unica finalidad de hacernos pasar un momento agradable, mientras nos invita a reflexionar sobre asuntos que nos afectan directamente y de los cuales, tal vez por falta de tiempo, no hacemos mucho caso. El escritor mexicano, F. Rubi, avecindado en la ciudad de Manzanillo por mas de treinta anos, se ha preocupado desde sus inicios, por ofrecernos trabajos literarios que nos ayuden a comprender nuestro entorno, pero adornados con esa dificil mezcla de rigor y jocosidad que hacen de sus libros un divertimento. Ojala que esten de acuerdo con nosotros

Coming off his unsuccessful 2004 New Hampshire state Senate campaign, Jerry Sorlucco realized something was fundamentally wrong in America. Across the country people had voted against their own best interest. The Republican far right-now the party of our modern robber barons-"waving the bloody shirt," and using the war on terrorism to instill fear, in league with the Christian evangelical movement, had won both houses of Congress and the White House. President George W. Bush, who had lost the popular vote in 2000 and won the election in a five to four vote by U.S. Supreme Court, had the power to put in motion an agenda that rewarded America's rich elitists and systematically set about destroying the nation's social safety net. Thoroughly researched and annotated, Facing Fascism takes the reader through the 2004 election, the manipulation of America's worldview, the mismanagement of the major issues facing the nation, and offers some solutions. It is a serious work, but essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what is happening in America. The book shows conclusively that the threat to America in the 21st century has all the characteristics of fascism, replete with class warfare, militarism, and religious nationalism.

Electronic participation is an emerging and growing research area that makes use of internet solutions to enhance citizens' participation in government processes in order to provide a fair and efficient society. This book examines recommender-system technologies and voting advice applications as tools to enable electronic citizen participation during election campaigns. Further, making use of fuzzy classification, it provides an evaluation framework for eParticipation. A dynamic voting advice application developed for the 2017 Ecuador national election serves as a real-world case study to introduce readers to the practical implementation and evaluation issues. The book concludes with a comprehensive analysis of the 2017 election project based on altmetrics, Google Analytics and statistics from the case study.

This book, the second of two volumes, explores the challenges and opportunities presented by the increased presence of social media within African politics. Electoral processes in Africa have assumed new dimensions due to the influence of social media. As social media permeates different aspects of elections, it is ostensibly creating new challenges and opportunities. Most evident are the challenges of hate speech, misogyny and incivility. This book considers the impact of digital media before, during, and after elections, as well as authorities' attempts to legislate and regulate the internet in response. Contributions to this volume analyse social media posts, transgressive images, newspaper articles, and include case studies of Algeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Uganda. This results in the delivery of an original depiction of the use of social media in a variety of African contexts. This book will appeal to academics and students of media and communication studies, political studies, journalism, sociology, and African studies.

This book explores why democratization processes in Sub-Saharan Africa have made so little progress despite more than two decades of multi-party politics on the subcontinent. By applying multiple linear regression analyses to a new data set on multi-party elections in Sub-Saharan Africa, the study investigates the relationship between political mobilizations and electoral competitiveness. It finds that the more societal groups engage in political mobilizations, such as protests and strikes, the more competitive elections become. Based on these results, the author argues for a change in the policies of international democracy assistance programs. The study's findings suggest that efforts to promote democracy would likely be more successful if international donors focused their support on organizations that have active constituencies and are willing to use their mobilization capacity to address ruling elites with political or socio-economic grievances.

This book explores the conflict between the Catalan project to become independent and the Spanish state's opposition to any attempt of secessionism. The volume addresses some of the key political and academic issues of contemporary European societies: nationalism, separatism and sovereignty. The banned referendum in Catalonia in October 2017 unveiled the existence of multiple crises, from territorial to economic and political. Indeed, the Catalan issue is about the crisis of sovereignty: who holds legitimacy to make decisions, and who is in power legally and politically? The book is structured according to three themes: sovereignty and its people, where the realignment to independence, populism and the definition of the demos are discussed; collective identities and actions, to account for the shaping of 'us', the importance of collective memory and the cross-alliances forged during the referendum; and internationalization, focusing on Europeanisation, international media and comparative constitutional perspectives.

"Nigeria's Stumbling Democracy and its Implications for Africa's Democratic Movement" is the first book to recount and analyze Nigeria's controversial general elections of April 2007. Because Nigeria's immense and diverse population of 140 million people and its wealth of natural resources make it a microcosm of Africa, Nigerian politics are an ideal case study and bellwether by which to view and understand African politics and the ongoing democratic experiments on the continent. Ten leading scholars of Nigerian and African politics, variously based in Nigeria, the US, and Europe, contribute original chapters commissioned by Professor Okafor to provide an account at once deep and comprehensive of what went wrong with these disputed presidential, federal, and state elections; together with their implications for the future of the democratic movement, both in Nigeria and in Africa as a whole.

Although the 2007 general elections resulted in the first-ever handover of political power from one civilian government to another in the history of Nigeria, by which the two-term Christian president Olusegun Obasanjon was succeeded by a Muslim, Alhaji Musa Yar'Adua, they were condemned by internal and international watchdogs for pervasive vote-rigging, violence, intimidation, and fraud which were, as this book documents, perpetrated by and with the connivance of the nation's security forces. The disappointment of continental hopes that these elections might finally break with Nigeria's history of tainted elections has grave repercussions for the democracy movement not only in Nigeria but throughout Africa-as seen in the knock-on effect upon the disastrous general elections in Kenya later the same year.

Wiefek presents evidence of a link between individual-level economic concerns and political opinion. Conceptualizing economic anxiety by applying social psychological theory to the distinct characteristics of the new American economy, she presents evidence that this postindustrial economic anxiety shapes beliefs and policy opinions, above and beyond ideology, partisanship, and income. Journalists and political commentators have written extensively on the political consequences of the strains created by the transformation of the U.S. economy over the last thirty years. Yet, the individual-level anxiety accompanying America's transition to a postindustrial, globalized economy has not been explored in any systematic way. In fact, what clear empirical evidence we do have strongly suggests that citizens do not link their personal fortunes to their political opinions. Wiefek argues that the way in which political scientists normally go about looking for these connections misses what citizens experience in their daily lives, particularly their emotional reactions. The measures commonly used by political scientists do not tap the specific features of America's post-1973 economic transformation or the anxiety, insecurity, and fear it engenders. Wiefek presents a conceptualization of economic anxiety that draws upon psychological, sociological, economic, and political science theories and findings, and the distinct nature of the new economy. Using data from a mail survey, she estimates the impact of economic anxiety and presents strong evidence of its predictive power on political opinion. She concludes with a discussion of the political implications of these findings and argues that the progressive political potential of shared anxieties will require reversing the anti-government bias endemic to our current public dialogue.

This book provides a framework for understanding and analyzing Bernie Sanders's democratic socialism, its origins, its maturation, and its evolution between 1972, when Sanders ran for the Vermont gubernatorial election for the first time, and 2020, when he made his second presidential run. The core argument is that Bernie Sanders's characteristic brand of socialism evolved from the mould of late 19th century utopian radicalism to radical demands for state and corporate accountability in the 21st century, turning into a social movement for reparative justice that rose to national prominence in the wake of the Great Recession in 2008 and of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011.

This book examines the effects of preferential voting on intraparty electoral competition and voting behavior. Using data covering 19 countries and over 200 elections, this study sheds light on a somewhat neglected aspect of electoral systems. The author demonstrates that the ability of voters to influence the selection and deselection of MPs under preferential voting systems is not as important as is often assumed. Instead, their ability to shape the election of a given candidate depends heavily on the balance between party power and voter power. In this way, this book advances the understanding of the effect of preferential voting on intra-party dynamics, parliamentary turnover, and voter behavior. Based on a rigorous, data-led methodological approach, the book contributes to both the theory and practice of the study of electoral systems, and should be read by scholars, students and practitioners interested in preferential voting systems.

In June 2010, Greg Fettig began a battle that would ultimately change the course of his life. Already involved in the Tea Party movement in Indiana, he started a campaign to target an icon of Washington elitism, six-term US Senator Richard Lugar, and ultimately oust him from power. He had no idea that the eighteen-month journey ahead would be fraught with twists and turns, bribes, threats, attacks, deception, and betrayal.

An inside look into the dark underbelly of politics, "Tea Party on Safari" takes you behind the scenes of one battle in an all-out war for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Fettig, along with fellow Tea Party patriot Monica Boyer, united under the banner of constitutional conservatism and set out to reclaim the Republican Party by purging it of RINOs-and they started with Senator Lugar.

Voting Lugar out of office remained their goal, and they pursued it with steady resolve. With Fettig and Boyer at the helm, the unified Tea Party waged the largest grass roots political campaign ever conducted in the young movement's history, seeking to send shockwaves of fear to the Washington, DC, establishment of both national political parties.