Voters expect their elected representatives to pursue good policy and presume this will be securely founded on the best available knowledge. Yet when representatives emphasize their reliance on expert knowledge, they seem to defer to people whose authority derives, not politically from the sovereign people, but from the presumed objective status of their disciplinary bases. This book examines the tensions between political authority and expert authority in the formation of public policy in liberal democracies. It aims to illustrate and better understand the nature of these tensions rather than to argue specific ways of resolving them. The various chapters explore the complexity of interaction between the two forms of authority in different policy domains in order to identify both common elements and differences. The policy domains covered include: climate geoengineering discourses; environmental health; biotechnology; nuclear power; whaling; economic management; and the use of force. This volume will appeal to researchers and to convenors of post-graduate courses in the fields of policy studies, foreign policy decision-making, political science, environmental studies, democratic system studies, and science policy studies.

Rejecting the view that states may be studied in isolation from one another, and proceeding from the assumption that political theory and international theory are part of a single continuum, this collection of essays employs both comparative method and an international perspective to assess what is happening to the chief political form of our time. In doing so, it questions recent major approaches of European and American scholarship which have tended to view the state as a formation serving capital, interests or classes. The approach of these essays is legal and constitutional, highlighting the changing nature of political communities and changing patterns of government. .

Addresses a gap in the market between policy and academia. Broad readership given the focus on climate change action, a hugely topical area. Interdisciplinary approach - politics, IPE, international economics, and environmental economics. Written in an accessible voice/style.

Numerous scholars have noticed that certain political institutions, including federalism, majoritarian electoral systems, and presidentialism, are linked to lower levels of income redistribution. This book offers a political geography explanation for those observed patterns. Each of these institutions is strongly shaped by geography and provides incentives for politicians to target their appeals and government resources to localities. Territorialized institutions also shape citizens' preferences in ways that can undermine the national coalition in favor of redistribution. Moreover, territorial institutions increase the number of veto points in which anti-redistributive actors can constrain reform efforts. These theoretical connections between the politics of place and redistributive outcomes are explored in theory, empirical analysis, and case studies of the USA, Germany, and Argentina.

Conventionally, ``absolutism'' in early-modern Europe has suggested unfettered autocracy and despotism -- the erosion of rights, the centralisation of decision-making, the loss of liberty. Everything, in a word, that was un-British but characteristic of ancien-regime France. Recently historians have questioned such comfortably simplistic views. This lively investigation of ``absolutism'' in action -- continent-wide but centred on a detailed comparison of France and England -- dissolves the traditional picture to reveal a much more complex reality; and in so doing illuminates the varied ways in which early-modern Europe was governed.

This book explores the increasingly broad terrain of drugs in American society with an emphasis on politics. It begins with the War on Drugs initiated by President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s and extends to the current day with the vast power of the pharmaceutical industry (Big Pharma), expansion of global criminal syndicates, militarization of the drug war, and struggles between states and federal government over the legalization of marijuana. From the beginning, the drug war produced increasing authoritarian tendencies in American politics, visible not only in swollen national bureaucracies and burgeoning police functions, but in the rise of the largest prison-industrial complex in the world, a surveillance state, and the weakening of personal privacy and freedoms. At the same time, the legal drug system with some of the most profitable business operations anywhere has expanded to create a huge medical edifice, affecting the delivery of health care, development of modern psychology, evolution of the treatment industry, and many other areas of contemporary life, including the world of sports and recreation. Although prohibitionism remains very much alive, targeting a wide range of illicit drugs, today it is the hundreds of widely-marketed chemical substances sold by Big Pharma that result in some of the most serious health problems affecting society. This book explores the long historical trajectory of both the War on Drugs and the growth of Big Pharma, focusing on social outcomes and political consequences in the US and beyond.

Legislators are entrusted with key parliamentary functions and are important figures in the decision-making process. Their behaviour as political elites is as much responsible for the failures and successes of the new democracies as their institutional designs and constitutional reforms. This book provides a comparative examination of representative elites and their role in democratic development in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It argues that as the drivers of the transformation process in CEE, individual and collective parliamentary actors matter. The authors provide an in-depth analysis of representatives from eleven national parliaments and explore country-specific features of recruitment and representation. They draw on an integrated dataset of parliamentary elites for individual, party family, and parliamentary variables over the 20 years following the collapse of Communism and develop a common framework for the analysis of variations in democratisation and political professionalisation between parliaments and political parties/party families across CEE. This unique volume will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, elite research, post-communist politics, democratisation, legislative studies, and parliamentary representation.

Interest in Arctic politics is on the rise. While recent accounts of the topic place much emphasis on climate change or a new geopolitics of the region, the history of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) and Arctic politics reaches back much further in time. Drawing out the complex relationship between domestic, Arctic, international and transnational Inuit politics, this book is the first in-depth account of the political history of the ICC. It recognises the politics of Inuit and the Arctic as longstanding and intricate elements of international relations. Beginning with European exploration of the region and concluding with recent debates over ownership of the Arctic, the book unfolds the history of a polity that has overcome colonization and attempted assimilation to emerge as a political actor which has influenced both Artic and global governance. This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of Arctic politics, indigenous affairs, IR theory and environmental politics.

Law, Force and Diplomacy at Sea, first published in 1985, is one of the few comprehensive treatments on the subject from a strategic perspective. It offers a detailed strategic analysis of the background and outcome of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, and its naval implications. The interplay between the interest of the naval powers in freedom of navigation and the interest of coastal states in control provides the setting for the strategic problems. The sea is taking on more properties of the land: it is becoming 'territorialised', and this is presenting fresh challenges and opportunities to which navies and their national governments have to respond. This study is designed for students of naval strategy, for international lawyers and for students of international affairs who wish to think about the important security questions in the maritime environment.

The role of national parliaments in EU matters has become an important subject in the debate over the democratic legitimacy of European Union decision-making. Strengthening parliamentary scrutiny and participation rights at both the domestic and the European level is often seen as an effective measure to address the perceived 'democratic deficit' of the EU - the reason for affording them a prominent place in the newly introduced 'Provisions on Democratic Principles' of the Union (in particular Article 12 TEU). Whether this aim can be met, however, depends crucially on the degree to which, and the manner in which, national parliaments actually make use of their institutional rights. This volume therefore aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the activities of national parliaments in the post-Lisbon Treaty era. This includes the 'classic' scrutiny of EU legislation, but also parliamentary involvement in EU foreign policy, the use of new parliamentary participation rights of the Lisbon Treaty (Early Warning System), their role regarding the EU's response to the Eurozone crisis, and the, so far under-researched, role of parliamentary administrators in scrutiny processes. This book was originally published as a special issue of West European Politics.

For many years now we have witnessed the developing use of the internet and associated technologies by political actors and organisations. Claims and counter claims have been made as its suitability as a tool to help in the struggle to re-invigorate political participation in democracies across the globe has been contested. This book charts the shifting sands of political activity in the digital age. It interrogates the hybrid nature of modern politics as online and offline actions blur the boundaries of traditional politics between 'real-life' co-presence and the booming virtual domain of politics. By so doing, it critically reflects on the latest scholarship on the subject while concurrently advancing stimulating new insights into it. Encapsulating both the range and the diverse velocities of change in different political arenas and geographical locations, this volumes seeks to map out a path if not towards the politics of tomorrow then towards a better comprehension of the politics of today. Featuring a range of international and comparative case studies presenting research on the UK, US, Italy, France, Spain, Romania, Africa and China, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Politics and Media, Political Communication, New Media studies, Public Administration, Sociology, Communication Studies, Computing and Information and Communications Technologies.

The author examines the linkages and similarities between compulsive athletics and eating disorders, and proposes that they are different manifestations of a single condition: the activity disorder.

This volume, first published in 1973, brings together a wide range of Professor Landau's work on recent Middle Eastern history and politics, reflecting the breadth of the author's concern and research. The first section deals with aspects of political organisation in the Middle East, largely Egypt, towards the end of the nineteenth century. A little-known plan of the Islamic reformer al-Afghani is discussed, showing him in a rather more political light than the religious haze which normally surrounds this pan-Islamic campaigner. The role of the influential secret societies in modern Egypt is outlined, and the politics behind the fluctuations in the degree of responsibility allowed to Egyptian ministers is examined. This section is concluded by a chapter on two proposals for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the Sudan in the early days of Zionism, throwing interesting light on the differing aims of early Zionists and alternative historical paths that might have been taken. The second section of the book contains studies on the Jewish situation in nineteenth-century Egypt, focusing on their position within the larger Muslim society and on socio-economic factors, as well as on the career of James Sanua ('Abu Naddara'), an Egyptian Jew who played a prominent part in nationalist agitation. The two final parts of the book turn to recent and contemporary electoral politics in the Middle East, with special attention being paid to the political leadership and voting behaviour of the Arabs in Israel. Other studies deal with elections in Lebanon and Turkey, and the final chapter analyses the militant right-wing elements in the Turkish political spectrum.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2016 Perhaps the most basic national security question that U.S. leaders and the body politic continuously face is where and under what circumstances to consider and in some cases resort to the use of armed force to ensure the country's safety and well-being. The question is perpetual-but the answer is not. This insightful text helps students make sense of the ever-changing environment and factors that influence disagreement over national security risks and policy in the United States. The book takes shape through a focus on three considerations: strategy, policy, and issues. Snow explains the range of plans of action that are possible and resources available for achieving national security goals, as well as the courses of action for achieving those goals in the context of a broad range of security problems that must be dealt with. However, there is little agreement among policymakers on exactly what is the nature of the threats that the country faces. Snow helps readers frame the debate by suggesting some of the prior influences on risk-assessment, some of the current influences on national security debates, and suggestions for how future strategy and policy may be shaped.

The lack of previous research into political interest groups and taking into account policy-specific and institutional context characteristics is largely due to research designs that have been primarily focused on a small number of policy debates, with the result that contextual characteristics were largely held constant. This book brings together articles from different modules that are part of a larger European Collaborative Research Project, INTEREURO, carried out by research teams in nine different countries under the auspices of the European Science Foundation. The main goal of the book is to analyse strategies, framing and influence processes for a set of 125 legislative proposals submitted by the European Commission, in an effort to better understand the involvement of interest organizations in the decision-making process of the EU. Contributors draw on sophisticated and innovative policy-driven samples of interest group mobilization, allowing them to account systematically for how policy-specific and institutional context factors shape mobilization, lobbying strategies and influence of interest groups on public policy debates in the EU. In this way, the book makes an important contribution to the study of interest groups in the EU and represents the breadth of positions taken in the current literature. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

This book presents some papers presented to a symposium on contemporary Yemen held in July 1983 by Exeter University's Centre for Arab Gulf Studies in collaboration with the Universities of Aden and San'a', and deals with history, internal and international politics, and administrative subjects.

This book considers whether the potential of democracy following the end of the Cold War was diminished by technocratic, judicial control of politics in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. It explores the complexities and drawbacks of modern constitutionalism by offering a comprehensive theoretical and comparative-empirical assessment of the status and role of constitutionalism in five new EU Member States. The democratization of countries in Central and Eastern Europe has been guarded by constitutions and constitutional courts. This book examines the implications of powerful courts and rigid constitutions for the democratic engagement of citizens and the political authority of politicians. Using an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, the book analyses the historical emergence of powerful constitutional institutions in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The author argues that the democratic promise of 1989 largely lost out to a technocratic and top-down view of judicial control of politics - a state of affairs reinforced by EU accession. The current backlash in countries such as Hungary and Romania indicates that the realization of democratization to the extent initially expected might be ever more remote in some new democracies. New Democracies in Crisis? will be of interest to students and scholars of European Union politics, democratization studies, European constitutionalism, socio-legal studies, governance and comparative politics.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. Set within the context of UK devolution and constitutional change, People, Places and Policy offers important and interesting insights into 'place-making' and 'locality-making' in contemporary Wales. Combining policy research with policy-maker and stakeholder interviews at various spatial scales (local, regional, national), it examines the historical processes and working practices that have produced the complex political geography of Wales. This book looks at the economic, social and political geographies of Wales, which in the context of devolution and public service governance are hotly debated. It offers a novel 'new localities' theoretical framework for capturing the dynamics of locality-making, to go beyond the obsession with boundaries and coterminous geographies expressed by policy-makers and politicians. Three localities - Heads of the Valleys (north of Cardiff), central and west coast regions (Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and the former district of Montgomeryshire in Powys) and the A55 corridor (from Wrexham to Holyhead) - are discussed in detail to illustrate this and also reveal the geographical tensions of devolution in contemporary Wales. This book is an original statement on the making of contemporary Wales from the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) researchers. It deploys a novel 'new localities' theoretical framework and innovative mapping techniques to represent spatial patterns in data. This allows the timely uncovering of both unbounded and fuzzy relational policy geographies, and the more bounded administrative concerns, which come together to produce and reproduce over time Wales' regional geography.

Is it possible to generate "capitalist spirit" in a society, where cultural, economic and political conditions did not unfold into an industrial revolution, and consequently into an advanced industrial-capitalist formation? This is exactly what some prominent public intellectuals in the late Ottoman Empire tried to achieve as a developmental strategy; long before Max Weber defined the notion of capitalist spirit as the main motive behind the development of capitalism. This book demonstrates how and why Ottoman reformists adapted (English and French) economic theory to the Ottoman institutional setting and popularized it to cultivate bourgeois values in the public sphere as a developmental strategy. It also reveals the imminent results of these efforts by presenting examples of how bourgeois values permeated into all spheres of socio-cultural life, from family life to literature, in the late Ottoman Empire. The text examines how the interplay between Western European economic theories and the traditional Muslim economic cultural setting paved the way for a new synthesis of a Muslim-capitalist value system; shedding light on the emergence of capitalism-as a cultural and an economic system-and the social transformation it created in a non-Western, and more specifically, in the Muslim Middle Eastern institutional setting. This book will be of great interest to scholars of modern Middle Eastern history, economic history, and the history of economic thought.

It has often been argued that Arab states are arbitrary political creations, lacking historical or present legitimacy. This book, first published in 1990, provides a different picture of 'the Arab state', drawing on historical, economic, philosophical and sociological perspectives to give a balanced and convincing view of the complex reality of contemporary Arab politics. The contributors, from the Arab countries, from Europe and the United States, investigate the roots of the nation state in the Arab world, evaluating in particular the economic bases of individual states. They discuss the evolution of Arab societies and the way this is reflected in different states, and examine the problems of domestic and international integration in the Arab context. Original and comprehensive in its findings, this is an essential text on the fundamental political structure of the Arab world. Its interdisciplinary breadth makes possible an entirely new reading of the political reality of the Middle East.

Egypt was the first Arabic-speaking country to throw off the yoke of Turkish rule, with an attendant growth in European influence. The impact of the West was most obvious in the political-constitutional field, with the gradual adoption of Western patterns of government and political life. This book, first published in 1953, is the first work to trace the development of parliamentary institutions and political parties in Egypt and to consider the extent of Western influence on their inception, evolution and disruption. Based on both Arabic and European sources, it is a comprehensive examination of the subject, and is key to the understanding of the development of the modern Middle East.

This title explores the role of women in the politics of national identity in Vietnam. Drawing on diverse primary resources--including state news media, government contests, tabloid journalism, and extensive interviews--the author examines the intimate connection between notions of Vietnamese femininity and the cultural quandaries of modernity in post-colonial Vietnam. The book covers the socialist and market reform periods (from the 1950s through the 1990s) and examines women's central place--as both symbols and disciplined subjects--in Vietnam's socialist modernization and ongoing capitalist transition.

In this book, first published in 1981, the authors trace and analyse the growth of transnational party co-operation and the factors important to it during the years before and immediately following direct elections. They recognise three major dimensions of transnational co-operation: the Euro-parliamentary groups; the new European party federations; and the national party frameworks in the member states. This title will be of interest to academics and students concerned with European affairs.

This handbook examines 25 years of decentralised governance and development in India. It provides a historical overview of developments since the introduction of decentralisation reforms (73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts) and critically assesses the measures initiated to strengthen decentralised institutions and deepen grassroots democracy. It also discusses the status of service delivery and identifies the issues and challenges involved in achieving development at the local level. The volume studies themes such as the devolution of powers in India, administrative and fiscal decentralisation, decentralised planning, Panchayats in scheduled areas, the sociological aspects of decentralisation, caste, gender and local democracy, capacity building, ICT for local governance, urban local governance, workfare and decentralisation, and decentralised natural resource management. It also looks at Panchayati Raj institutions from a Gandhian perspective. The first of its kind, this handbook will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of decentralisation and development, development studies, fiscal decentralisation, political studies, political sociology, Indian politics, Indian government, public policy and governance, political economy, South Asian studies, and South Asian politics.