Coalitions are the commonest kind of democratic government, occurring frequently in most countries of Western Europe. It is usually assumed that political parties came together in a government coalition because they agree already, or can manage to reach an agreement, on the policy it should pursue. This book checks this idea out, in 12 countries of Western Europe plus Israel, using evidence from party election programmes and government programmes. It demonstrates that party policies do influence government programmes, but not to the extent they would if policy-agreement were the sole basis of coalition.

This work will provide an authoritative and illuminating overview of the U.S. Congress, from the history of the Senate and the House of Representatives to the rules, procedures, and traditions that govern its operations and lawmaking. This volume provides a comprehensive survey of the history and inner workings of the United States Congress, the legislative branch of the federal government. It will explain its relationship to the other two branches of government (executive and judicial), detail the unique structures, responsibilities, and procedures of both houses of Congress, discuss major historical events and controversies, highlight particularly influential leaders in Congress from the earliest days of the Republic to the present, and show readers how the priorities of the U.S. Congress shift depending on whether it is held by the Democratic or Republican party. This book is part of ABC-CLIO's Student Guides to American Government and Politics series. Each volume in the series provides a student-friendly introduction to a distinct component of American governmental institutions and processes and shows how it pertains to American politics and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Offers a complete and authoritative overview of how Congress works, from distinct responsibilities of the Senate and House of Representatives to how committee assignments are distributed Explains how Congress functions in the wider world of American politics, including in campaigns and elections Details important events and developments in the history of Congress in a chronology Includes a bibliography of valuable and student-friendly resources for further study

This book provides a wealth of empirical material to understand key aspects of EU governance including its plurality of actors and policy making modes and its functioning during crisis management. Authored by legal scholars and political scientists, it presents new research and insights on the role of EU agencies in the context of the Euro and migration crises. Specifically, the contributions assess why the crises have led to the creation of new EU agencies and what roles these agencies have performed since their inception; how the crisis, notably the migration crisis, has impacted on existing EU agencies; how EU agencies have shaped the policies during and after the crises; and, how the crisis has affected the accountability of EU agencies. This book is essential in understanding the intricacies of EU crisis management and the specific role of EU agencies therein, as well as EU governance more broadly. Chapter 9 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book critically surveys a decade of disasters in Otautahi Christchurch. It brings together a diverse range of authors, disciplinary approaches and topics, to reckon with the events that commenced with the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence. Each contribution tackles its subject matter through the frame of Critical Disaster Studies (CDS). The events and the subsequent recovery provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn from a series of concatenating urban disasters in order to prepare us for our future on an urban planet facing unprecedented environmental pressures. The book focuses on the production of vulnerability, the human dimensions of disaster, the Indigenous response to disasters and the practical lessons that can be drawn from them.

Introducing the institutional logics perspective to street-level analysis, this book examines how street-level workers deal with the institutional logics that guide their organization - whether they follow or challenge them. While doing so, the book develops a theoretical framework to study street-level workers' institutional agency within organizations from different institutional backgrounds. The book conceptualizes street-level workers as institutional entrepreneurs and presents an original process model to capture deinstitutionalization efforts in street-level discourse. This ordinal model accounts for embedded agency and institutional entrepreneurship as well as for more gradual moves towards deinstitutionalization through the hybridization of institutional logics. The author tests the model empirically using interview data and discusses how street-level workers diverge from the institutional logic of their organization in almost two thirds of their statements, indicating a tendency towards institutional entrepreneurship. The book finally combines two literature strands: institutionalism and implementation research, showing how street-level workers may be perceived as institutional entrepreneurs. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of political science, public policy, public administration, and organizational studies, as well as to practitioners and policy-makers interested in a better understanding of institutional entrepreneurs, street work, and the institutional logics perspective.

Policy knowledge derived from data, information, and evidence is a powerful tool for contributing to policy discussions and debates, and for understanding and improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of government action. For decades, politicians, advocates, reformers, and researchers have simultaneously espoused this value, while also paradoxically lamenting the lack of impact of policy knowledge on decision making, and the failure of related reforms. This text explores this paradox, identifying the reliance on a proverb of using policy knowledge to supplant politics as a primary culprit for these perceived failures. The evidence in this book suggests that any consideration of the role of policy knowledge in decision making must be considered alongside, rather than in place of, considerations of the ideologies, interests, and institutional factors that shape political decisions. This contextually rich approach offers practical insights to understand the role of policy knowledge, and to better leverage it to support good governance decisions.

Media Relations and the Modern First Lady: From Jacqueline Kennedy to Melania Trump examines the communication strategies first ladies and their teams have used to manage press and public interest in their private lives, to promote causes close to their hearts, and to shape their public image. Starting with Jacqueline Kennedy, who was the first to have a staffer with the title "press secretary," each chapter explores the relationship between a first lady and the media, the role played by her press secretary and communication staff in cultivating this relationship, and the first lady's media coverage. Contributors exploring the following questions: How effective were the media relations and communication strategies of this first lady and her team? What worked and what did not? Was the first lady a communication asset to her husband's administration? And what can we learn from their media relations strategies? Along with contributing to the scholarship on presidential spouses, the contributions to this volume also highlight the important role media relations plays in strategic political communication. Scholars of communication, media studies, gender and women's studies, political science, and public relations will find this book particularly useful.

In Exit Strategies and State Building, fifteen of the world's best scholars and practitioners of peace building focus on relevant historical and contemporary cases to provide a comprehensive overview of this issue. The book identifies four basic types of international operations where state-building has been a major objective-colonial administrations, peacekeeping operations, international administrations, and military occupations. Editor Richard Caplan and his contributors cover a variety of topics, from broad-ranging studies of exit in many types of state-building operations, to focused studies on specific historical cases, to thematic analyses under frameworks such as economics and global international relations. By examining the major challenges associated with the conclusion of international state-building operations and the requirements for the maintenance of peace in the period following exit, this book provides a unique perspective on the realities of military and political intervention. Given the twenty-first century trend toward international intervention the world over , Exit Strategies and State Building sheds more light on what is not merely an academic issue, but a pressing global policy concern.

This edited volume addresses the accomplishments, prospects and challenges of regional integration processes on the African continent. Since regional integration is a process that ebbs and flows according to a wide range of variables such as changing political and economic conditions, implications and factors derived from the vagaries of migration and climate change, it is crucial to be cognizant with how these variables impact regional integration initiatives. The contributors discuss the debates on Pan-Africanism and linking it with ongoing discourses and policies on regional integration in Africa. Other aspects of the book contain some of the most important topic issues such as migration, border management and the sustainable development goals. This content offers readers fresh and innovative perspectives on various aspects of sustainable development and regional growth in Africa.

With recent advances and investment in artificial intelligence, are we on the verge of introducing virtual public servants? Governments around the world are rapidly deploying robots and virtual agents in healthcare, education, local government, social care, and criminal justice. These advances not only promise unprecedented levels of control and convenience at a reduced cost but also claim to connect, to empathise, and to build trust. This book documents how-after decades of designing out costly face to face transactions, investment in call centres, and incentivising citizens to self-service-the tech industry is promising to re-humanise our frontline public services. It breaks out of disciplinary silos and moves us on from the polarised hype vs. fear discussion on the future of work. It does so through in-depth Q-methodology interviews with a wide range of frontline public servants, from doctors to librarians, from social workers to school receptionists, and from police officers to call handlers. The first of its kind, this book should be of interest across the social sciences and to anyone concerned with how recent measures to digitise and automate our services are paving the way for the development of full-blown AI in frontline work.

This book examines changing Soviet and Russian press coverage of the United States from the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev through the presidency of Vladimir Putin. A new afterword focuses on recent developments in the Russian media and Russian press coverage of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Becker argues that due to the absence of a language to support the reform strategy, the Soviet press presented positive images of its chief ideological and military opponent, the United States, as a means of supporting political, social and economic reform. He suggests that the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a more self-confident Russia means that the symbolic and discursive significance of the United States for Russia has diminished.

This book explores how China's political system responds to crisis. A crisis is an episode whose impact cannot be controlled merely by astute on-the-ground incident management, particularly in cases involving widespread doubt about the legitimacy of established policy paradigms or the political order as a whole. Crisis can create "political windows" for advocacy groups challenging established policies in pluralist democracies. The political battle between competing definitions of an uncertain and ambiguous situation among the various actors provides them with crisis-induced opportunity space for dramatic policy change. However, the process of crisis-induced policy change, mainly by crisis framing, in non-west regimes like China has not been adequately addressed. As China's leadership foregrounds legitimacy in "victory" over COVID-19, and a new era of climate change disasters begins, this dynamic model of crisis and recuperation will offer food for thought for scholars of Chinese and global politics.

The North Caucasus, specifically Chechnya and Ingushetia is a region that has experienced some of the deadliest and most protracted conflicts in Europe. Chechnya is currently a totalitarian enclave within the increasingly authoritarian Russian Federation, while Ingushetia still suffers from lingering political conflicts and chronic problems with the quality of governance. By examining the relationship between state and society, this book considers how state-building has unfolded in a region with highly complex social structures, a history of colonialism, Soviet authoritarianism, and later post-Soviet wars and trauma. Focusing on a systematic analysis of subnational state-building in post-Soviet Chechnya and Ingushetia and the role of teips (clans) in this process, this study responds to the widely accepted academic claim that governance and ethnic consolidation in the North Caucasus are shaped by the politics of teips and the belief that late and uneven modernization, and the survival of tribal structures have been accountable for systematic failures in state-building in the region. The research is based on over 200 interviews which the author carried out in Ingushetia and Chechnya, as well as interviews with Chechen exiled politicians in Europe. The book also features never-before-seen access to the archives of the Chechen Parliament during the period of de facto independence. Through research into the socio-anthropological analysis of the clans and how they function towards political systems, Sokirianskaia shows how the teips lost their traditional organizational structure and roles, becoming incapable of mobilizing for political action. She argues that while teip symbolism has remained politically relevant, and the bonds of kinship are highly important, they do not form the basis of politics and subnational state-building in Chechnya and Ingushetia. Consequently, subnational authoritarianism is not the result of the pre-existing social composition of the society, but a reflection of institutional rules imposed by Moscow.

This book contains eight papers focusing on factors associated with the growth of government. There is a large literature in public economics, especially public choice, on the determinants of the growth of government. The papers in this volume focus on a number of arguments related to why government has grown in many developed countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapters focus on taxation, trade openness, technology, income changes, and tax compliance. The volume features prominent scholars such as Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, Casey Mulligan, Gordon Tullock, Randall Holcombe, and Tyler Cowen.

This edited volume discusses digital democracy at the local level in Europe. Contrasting the political discourse surrounding participatory digital democracy with actual experiences of implementation, the book provides a wholistic view of digital democracy across Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. The book is divided into three parts. Chapters in Part I analyze discourses about participatory democracy in Europe. Chapters in Part II provide case studies of digital democracy practices at the local level in the EU. Chapters in Part III discuss the risks and challenges associated with digital democracy. Written by a panel of international, interdisciplinary experts, this volume will be of interest to researchers, students, and practitioners across public administration, political science, economics, management, and sociology.

The world is changing at a fast pace, so is the Government and Governance style. Humans are bound to go for Algorithmic strategies rather than manual or electronic ones in different domains. This book introduces the Algorithmic Government or Government by Algorithm, which refers to authorizing machines in the Public Sector for automated decision-making based on Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and other technologies. It is an emerging concept introduced globally and will be considered revolutionary in the future. The book covers concepts, applications, progress status, and potential use-cases of Algorithmic Government. This book serves as introductory material for the readers from technology, public policy, administration, and management fields.

A thrilling behind-the-scenes exploration of how governments past and present have been led astray by bad data - and why it is so hard to measure things and to do it well.

Our politicians make vital decisions and declarations every day that rely on official data. But should all statistics be trusted? In BAD DATA, House of Commons Library statistician Georgina Sturge draws back the curtain on how governments of the past and present have been led astray by figures littered with inconsistency, guesswork and uncertainty.

Discover how a Hungarian businessman's bright idea caused half a million people to go missing from UK migration statistics. Find out why it's possible for two politicians to disagree over whether poverty has gone up or down, using the same official numbers, and for both to be right at the same time. And hear about how policies like ID cards, super-casinos and stopping ex-convicts from reoffending failed to live up to their promise because they were based on shaky data.

With stories that range from the troubling to the empowering to the downright absurd, BAD DATA reveals secrets from the usually closed-off world of policy-making. It also suggests how - once we understand the human story behind the numbers - we can make more informed choices about who to trust, and when.

Is Euroscepticism still suited to analyze the variegated nature of opposition to the EU? Starting from this question, this book critically reviews Euroscepticism, reconceptualizes it in terms of political opposition and discovers, disentangles and explains patterns of EU-opposition within the European Parliament (EP). Distinguishing between "what the EU does" and "what the EU is", the research elaborates an index of parties' positioning "measuring" it through the speeches that parties' deliver in the EP. The EP is the "perfect laboratory" where decisions concerning EU-policies are taken and the future EU-trajectories are shaped. Besides delineating a set of guidelines categorizing parties, the book concludes that their positioning varies along two main axes: the pro-anti-EU-system and the pro-anti-EU-establishment. From a normative perspective, the research argues for the growing importance of the "cumulation hypothesis": if criticism remains unheard within the European elitist construct, such criticism will transform itself into rejection.

Few terms are so widely used in the literature of international relations and political science, with so little agreement about their exact meaning, as hegemony. In the first full historical study of its fortunes as a concept, Perry Anderson traces its emergence in Ancient Greece and its rediscovery during the upheavals of 1848-1849 in Germany. He then follows its checkered career in revolutionary Russia, fascist Italy, Cold War America, Gaullist France, Thatcher's Britain, post-colonial India, feudal Japan, Maoist China, eventually arriving at twenty-first-century US geopolitics and Germany's place within an expanded European Union. The result is a surprising and fascinating expedition into global intellectual history.

This book provides an all-round analysis and exploration of the course, status quo and future of the Chinese Government's governance reform under the framework of government governance modernization. The authors bring their decades of experience in crafting policy in China to explain the relationship between China's government and market, between government and society, between the central government and local governments, functional transformation, organizational structure optimization, reform of public institutions, allocation of fiscally supported personnel, the building of a law-based government and other major issues, while also laying out a case for structural changes in the years to come.

This book attempts to develop a novel way of conceptualizing regionalism under hyper-globalization. Until recently, regionalism has been often framed in terms of economic interdependence and security connectivity in which sovereign states are the key navigators within the liberal world order. Under hyper-globalization in the third millennium, hyper-globalization forces us to capture global politics at two more levels of measurement at the state level and both there below and there above. First, how 29 Asian sovereign states join multilateral treaty participation to develop their global quasi-legislative types and how citizens' satisfaction with quality of life in 29 civil societies shapes their societal types. Second, relating these two features above and below sovereign states, the book attempts to measure the features and speculate on the futures of four Asian regionalisms (Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia) and their prospect of the demographically largest continent called Asia in the twenty-first century. Regionalism is measured by the proclivity of 600 multilateral treaty participation in terms of speed (cautious versus agile), angle (global commons versus individual interests) and strategy (aspirational bonding versus mutual binding), whereas quality of life is measured by citizens' satisfaction with 16 domains, aspects and styles of individual daily life in terms of survival (or materialism), social relations (post-materialism) and public policy preponderance. The book opens an innovative vista to better understand tumultuous global politics. This ambitious volume leverages original survey data on citizen satisfaction and country-level data on treaty accessions to characterize the trajectories of countries in four regions of Asia as they adapt -- or fail to adapt -- to the challenges of globalization in the 21st century and beyond. Readers will learn much about politics from the basic level of the individual citizen to the most comprehensive level of the global system - and about the interactions of politics at all levels. -- Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science, Columbia University A wonderful attempt to link a country's domestic development and its adaptation to the global politics. It is truly eye-opening and the findings are likely to significantly shape our understanding of life and global politics. -- Zhengxu Wang, Ph.D. Distinguished Professor, Department of Political Science, Fudan University

This book offers readers a comprehensive introduction to the functions of the government in contemporary China. Further, it creates a framework to describe urban governance in today's China, which consists of four basic modes: the omnipotent government mode, autonomous governance mode, integrated governance mode and cooperative governance mode. The book defines a "city" as a gathering place for high-quality public service resources, and the basic task of urban governance is to provide high-quality public services and maintain the sustainability of fiscal revenues. By focusing on current "hot topics" in urban governance in China, including the institutional development of urban governance, model interpretation, city/county relationship, cross-border governance, cross-sectoral coordination, street management, community service provision, and municipal performance evaluation, it clarifies a number of common misunderstandings in the field of urban management and practice. Lastly, the book analyses the current integrated governance model used in Chinese cities, which relies on the authority of the government and integrates the market and social subjects across borders by means of qualification identification, resource support, elite absorption, party-group embeddedness, and project cooperation. However, this model is currently facing several problems. In order to address the potential risks of integrated governance, the book argues that we need to develop new institutional arrangements based on collaborative governance.

This book seeks to consistently explain the role of ideas and institutions in policy outcomes, and addresses the problem of how resource nationalism causes a deficit of public accountability in oil producing countries from Latin America and the Caribbean. The authors present a causal mechanism linking ideas and policy outcomes through institutional arrangements, focusing on policy design to describe the role of instruments selection and combination in improving or reducing public accountability through agenda setting, policy formulation, cross-sectorial coordination and political interplays.

This book presents solutions to problems that are total and based on thinking about how and why humans have organized themselves. It discusses how to avoid the now well-documented Holocene Extinction, propelled by climate change, wars, resource depletion, desertification, degrading knowledge quality, famine, and deterioration of societies overall. It explains why we cannot respond effectively with hedonistic, incompetent, corrupt, and anarchistic "liberal democracy" and why neither personality cult regimes can suffice.  The book offers a model of an organic social structure embodying a collective consciousness of communitarianism and Platonic-style ethos. Putting an emphasis on the re-establishment of Classical Greek virtue, it offers solutions to resolve identity politics, alienation, and meritocracy. While doing so, the author opposes the "everyone is equal" ideology to govern the section of policymakers, instead circumscribing "rights" in terms of responsibilities, prioritizing education and training to carry forth the ethos of valuing truth above materialism, and developing Durkheim's social brain via a new discipline, "sociointelligence". The book goes on to explain how underpinning these elements is a comprehensive elucidation of often misunderstood words like "liberty", "freedom", "authoritarianism", and "democracy". All of these areas are arranged and combined in uniquely describing the organic society the author deems necessary to avoid human extinction. As a result, the book presents a “new organicity�, where the emerging transhumanism seeks to transcend hydrocarbon-based life with humanly-constructed life. This book will appeal to students, researchers, and scholars of political science, philosophy, and the social sciences interested in a better understanding of complexity, democratic theory, Holocene Extinction, organic thinking, and meritocratic societies. 

Examines the creation and implementation of South Africa's National Peace Accord and this key transitional phase in the country's history, and its implications for peace mediation and conflict resolution. It is now 30 years since the National Peace Accord (NPA) was signed in South Africa, bringing to an end the violent struggle of the Apartheid era and signalling the transition to democracy. Signed by the ANC Alliance, the Government, the Inkatha Freedom Party and a wide range of other political and labour organizations on 14 September 1991, the parties agreed in the NPA on the common goal of a united, non-racial democratic South Africa, and provided practical means for moving towards this end: codes of conduct for political organizations and for the police, the creation of national, regional and local peace structures for conflict resolution, the investigation and prevention of violence, peace monitoring, socio-economic reconstruction and peacebuilding. This book, written by one of those involved in the process that evolved, provides for the first time an assessment and in-depth account of this key phase of South Africa's history. The National Peace Campaign set up under the NPA mobilized the 'silent majority' and gave peace an unprecedented grassroots identity and legitimacy. The author describes the formulation of the NPA by political representatives, with Church and business facilitators, which ended the political impasse, constituted South Africa's first experience of multi-party negotiations, and made it possible for the constitutional talks (Codesa) to start. She examines the work of the Goldstone Commission, which prefigured the TRC, as well as the role of international observers from the UN, EU, Commonwealth and OAU. Exploring the work of the peace structures set up to implement the Accord - the National Peace Committee and Secretariat, the 11 Regional Peace Committees and 263 Local Peace Committees, and over 18,000 peace monitors - Carmichael provides a uniquely detailed assessment of the NPA, the on-the-ground peacebuilding work and the essential involvement of the people at its heart. Filling a significant gap in modern history, this book will be essential reading for scholars, students and others interested in South Africa's post-Apartheid history, as well as government agencies and NGOs involved in peacemaking globally.