In politics, individual political behavior is often ascribed to class and ethnic identity. How does this happen? In this text, Needler shows how the individual constructs his or her political identity, and develops ideologies that guide their political behavior. Intended as an alternative to traditional introductory texts in politics and political science, this book is, at the same time, a survey and introduction to political theory, a survey and introduction to comparative and American politics, and a review of contemporary international relations. These topics are combined in a novel and creative way so as to provide a readable and informative text for undergraduate students or laypersons. The author's fresh approach will be welcomed by teachers in politics and political science.

How safe is Turkey's liberal democracy? The rise to power in 2002 of the right-leaning Islamic Justice and Development Party ignited fears in the West that Turkey could no longer be relied upon to provide a buffer against the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Once hailed by the West as a model of secularism and moderation in the Muslim world, Turkey is now seen to be under the influence of the 'creeping Islamisation' of the JDP (or AKP as it is known in Turkey). Yet to what extent has this affected the lives of Turkish citizens? Evangelia Axiarlis here explores the contribution of the JDP to civil liberties and basic freedoms, long suppressed by secular and statist Kemalist ideology, and how this has remained unexamined despite more than a decade in government. In this - the first detailed study of the policies and ideology of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an's government - the author examines the extent to which the JDP has worked to improve civil life in Turkey and critically addresses whether a government built on Islamic principles can champion political reform. Exploring how Islam and democracy are neither monoliths nor mutually exclusive, this is a timely contribution to the wider understanding of political Islam.

This book treats two basic subjects: (1) royalist explanations of the causes of the French Revolution, and (2) royalist defenses of royalist political positions. The royalists began with a simplistic conspiracy theory of history--the Old Regime was right. But then they came up with increasingly sophisticated explanations, thereby making an important contribution to historical explanation. In political thought, they eventually offered a tempered defense of the Old Regime, a call for political elitism in the face of the chaos unleashed by the Revolution, and an early explanation of the organic theory of history, a true contribution to political thought.

The newest volume in the Elections in Israel series focuses on the twentieth Knesset elections held in March 2015 following the collapse of the third Netanyahu government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's main opposition party, the Zionist Camp, ran a negative personalized election campaign, assuming that Israelis had grown tired of him. Netanyahu, however, achieved a surprising and dramatic victory by enhancing and radicalizing the same identity politics strategies that helped him win in 1996. The Elections in Israel 2015 dissects these and other campaigns, from the perspective of the voters, the media and opinion polls, the political parties, and electoral competition. Several contributors delve into the Left and Arab fear mongering Likud campaign, which produced strategic identity voting. Other contributions analyze in-depth the Israeli party and electoral systems, highlighting the exceptional decline of the mainstream parties and the adoption of a higher electoral threshold. Providing a close analysis of electoral competition, legitimacy struggles, stability and change in the voting behavior of various groups, partisanship, personalization and political polarization, this volume is a crucial record of Israeli political history.

Drawing from research conducted in Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda, Christianity, Islam, and Liberal Democracy offers a deeper understanding on how Christian and Islamic faith communities affect the political attitudes of those who belong to them and, in turn, prospects for liberal democracy. While many analysts have thought that religious diversity in developing countries is most often an obstacle to liberal democracy that creates political instability, the book concludes just the opposite. Robert A. Dowd draws on narrative accounts, in-depth interviews, and large-scale surveys to show that Christian and Islamic religious communities are more likely to support liberal democracy in religiously diverse and integrated settings than in religiously homogeneous or segregated settings. Religious diversity, in other words, is good for liberal democracy. In religiously diverse environments, religious leaders tend to be more encouraging of civic engagement, democracy, and religious liberty. The evidence, Dowd argues, should prompt policymakers interested in cultivating religiously-inspired support for liberal democracy to aid in the formation of religiously diverse neighborhoods, cities, and political organizations.

Militant Islamic fundamentalists blame the ills of their societies on the West and call for the overthrow of local governments and the resumption of Jihad against the Infidels. Ambassador Hoveyda explores the historical and contemporary causes of the current wave of militant Islamic fundamentalism. Despite their terrorist attacks in the West, he also shows why fundamentalists are even more dangerous for Muslim countries that are desperately trying to catch up with the incipient global economy and alleviate their accumulated social and economic problems. If Western colonization and economic domination of the 19th and 20th centuries are to be blamed for the predicament of Muslim countries, Hoveyda points out that Muslims also bear a great responsibility for their situation. He shows how the triumph of fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran in the 12th century triggered the gradual decline of Islamic civilization. He also chronicles the history of militant Islamic movements of the past and present from the Assassins of the late 11th century to Ayatollah Khomeini. Having met his first militant Islamic fundamentalist at the age of four in Syria, where his father was serving as Persian Consul-general, Hoveyda draws upon a lifetime of personal experience as well as scholarship and experiences of others to provide an important insider/outsider examination of a worldwide concern.

Hands, face, space. Curfews. Don't drink. Bend your knees. Conform, obey, comply - surrender. British life has become infested by bossiness. Boris Johnson won power as one of life's free-wheelers but his first year as PM saw a fever of finger-wagging. The real pandemic? Passive-aggressive ninnying by politicians, scientists and officialdom. From Sage with its graphs to BBC grandees telling us not to sing 'Rule Britannia', the National Trust with its slavery mania, to calorie counts on menus: why won't they leave us alone? Theatre directors beat us over the head with their agitprop. Militant cyclists scream at us from their saddles. Meghan Markle ticks us off for not being more Californian. Bossiness: did it begin when Moses came down from the mountain with his tablets? Cromwell beat Chris Whitty to it by four centuries and banned Christmas. A. Hitler, B. Mussolini and J.V. Stalin: they liked to throw their weight around, but today's self-serving dictators are more subtle. They do it with a caring smile. Tell us it's for our own good. They claim to be liberals! Following his best-selling Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain and his 2017 Christmas favourite Patronising Bastards, parliamentary sketchwriter Quentin Letts storms back into hard covers with a vituperative howl against the 'bossocracy'. They tell us what to do, what to say, how to think. Letts gives them a prolonged, resonant raspberry. He names the guilty men and women: Dominic Cummings, Prof Neil Ferguson, that strutting self-polisher Nicola Sturgeon, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cressida Dick, Michael Gove, even the sainted Sir David Attenborough. Bang! They all take a barrel. And then there's publicity-prone plonker Matt Hancock posing for photographs while doing his 'Mr Fit' press-ups. Reasonable people have had enough of being bossed about. And when reasonable people stop respecting the law, society has a problem.

Two Italian writers, Gaetano Mosca and Antonio Gramsci, have been very influential in twentieth-century political thought, the first cast as a thoroughgoing conservative, the second as the model of a humanistic Marxist. The author of this provocative book -- the first systematic study of the connection between the two men -- maintains that they are closer to each other than is commonly supposed -- that they in fact belong to the same political tradition of democratic elitism.

Maurice A. Finocchiaro argues that Gramsci's political theory is a constructive critique of Mosca's and that the key common element is the attempt to combine democracy and elitism in a theoretical system that defines them not as opposite but as compatible and interdependent. Finocchiaro finds that a critical examination of the major works of the two men demonstrates their shared belief in the viability of democratic elitism and undermines the importance of the distinction between right and left.

This book examines what 'republicanism' meant to the Americans who drafted and ratified the United States Constitution, guaranteeing a 'republican form of government' to every state in the Union. M.N.S.Sellers compares the writings and speeches of the founders with the authors they read and imitated to identify the central tenets of American republicanism, and to demonstrate that American republican though directly reflected classical models, rather than a mediating tradition of English or continental political theory.

"This reference work provides material never before gathered in a single volume. The scholarship is solid, and the text is a delight to read. Unlike most dictionaries, this one should be read from cover to cover. Recommended for all academic and public libraries." Choice

In Art and Politics, Segal explores the collision of politics and art in seven enticing essays. The book explores the position of art and artists under a number of different political regimes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, traveling around the world to consider how art and politics have interacted and influenced each other in different conditions. Joes Segal takes you on a journey to the Third Reich, where Emil Nolde supported the regime while being called degenerate; shows us Diego Rivera creating Marxist murals in Mexico and the United States for anti-Marxist governments and clients; ties Jackson Pollock's drip paintings in their Cold War context to both the FBI and the CIA; and considers the countless images of Mao Zedong in China as unlikely witnesses of radical political change.

China and Taiwan have similar political cultures. However, the Chinese intellectual and political elite have failed to democratize the Middle Kingdom since the 4 May 1919 Movement; whilst their Taiwanese counterpart succeeded in making the island state fairly democratic in just over four decades since the 28 February 1947 Uprising.;After an examination of the approaches they applied, the author finds that the former have pursued a culturalist route by trying to change the psycho-cultural make-up of the Chinese people. Conversely, Taiwan followed an institutional road in which they tried to win elections and to set up political organizations, such as parties.

This book is a contribution to contemporary debates on social research with a unique focus on the relationship between methods and the crafting of knowledge. Nine experienced researchers from different disciplines have come together to explore what really matters to them in the process of doing qualitative research.

Neal Lawson and Neil Sherlock have gathered together a team of leading politicians, journalists, and academics in this controversial look at the future of the centre-left in Britain. The contributors identify the failures of social democracy and liberalism in the last century and seek to unify these two strands of progressive thinking, providing insightful analysis of the opportunities and threats that face New Labour and the centre-left.

Realism remains a predominant and most debated theoretical approach in International Relations research. Whether considered a scientific and accurate reflection of world politics or as reactionary and a distortion of realities and possibilities, both realism and its structural variant continue to be a source of fruitful research—whether within the program or in its rejection. The Realism approach itself is not uniform whether in relation to its implications or methodologies. Here leading scholars provide important perspectives on the insights and directions of Realist research in some of its most interesting variants. From rational choice to case studies, from theory to practice, the contributors explore both classic tenets of Realism as the balance of power and such apparent inconsistencies as foolish policies.

By showing what is out there in the field of study and threading it through the eye of a local context, the following book establishes that a tension exists between the way we frame democratization and the conclusions we arrive at. It demonstrates how and why interpreting ambiguity matters in the study of Indonesia's post-authoritarian settlement.

This collection of previously out-of-print titles examines the state of Turkey in both its Ottoman and modern incarnations. Radical politics are detailed alongside constitutional democracy, as well as Ottoman politics and history.

South Korea's path toward a higher quality of life has been a dynamic process, Suh shows, shaped by historical contingencies, some immutable logic of capitalist development, and a dialectical relationship between the state and Korean civil society. Debunking the illusion of democracy and myths of self-regulating capitalism in South Korea, Suh shows that a growth machine is not a panacea for the development of human beings and their quality of life. If instead the raison d'etre of quality of life depended upon a robust civil society operating under fair rules of the game by the state, the developmental road would be more promising.

Suh seeks to test the hypothesis that the rising tide of economic growth will raise all boats in the Korean sea, remapping its structural pressure points which have been submerged at high tide. Given the high levels of economic growth generated by state intervention, any demand of distributive justice necessitates egailitarian reforms. As Suh shows, the present South Korean situation goes straight to the heart of theoretical questions about the enduring structures of capitalism, and its promise to improve average living standards and to link the redistribution of economic rewards to enhanced economic performance of the system as a whole.

South Korea's path to quality of life has been a dynamic process, Suh shows, determined by historical contingencies, with some immutable logic of capitalist development, and a dialectical relationship between the state and Korean civil society. A study of particular interest to scholars, researchers, and policy makers concerned with political economy and social-economic development and East Asian Studies.

Political sociology continues to be the most significant place for the study of the relationship between society and politics. The study of political participation has always formed an important part of this research and in this volume, we present a diverse collection of works dedicated to assessing current research and future directions in the field. In the first volume of the series, Braungart suggested that political occurrences are born out of social dynamics. We find continued evidence of this.The electoral politics of society, whether unusual as presented in the symposium of the US 2000 election, or more routine, can be understood in terms of models of political participation that build on the work of political sociologists over the last 25 years. The contributors also examine political participation in the form of social and political movements, sharing the theoretical frameworks used by political sociologists to understand, describe and predict political participation. In compiling this volume we find the study of political participation to be alive and well, providing fruitful arguments and ideas for future research.

This book examines Foucault's political framework for connecting political authority with practices of freedom. It starts from the older Foucault's claim that where there is obedience there cannot be government by truth. Then it shows how this claim runs like a red thread through his entire life project.