What explains contemporary variations in African legislative institutions - including their strengths and weaknesses? Compared with the more powerful executive branches, legislatures throughout the continent have historically been classified as weak and largely inconsequential to policy-making processes. But, as Ken Ochieng' Opalo suggests here, African legislatures actually serve important roles, and under certain conditions, powerful and independent democratic legislatures can emerge from their autocratic foundations. In this book, Opalo examines the colonial origins of African legislatures, as well as how postcolonial intra-elite politics structured the processes of adapting inherited colonial legislatures to local political contexts and therefore continued legislative development. Through case studies of Kenya and Zambia, Opalo offers a comparative longitudinal study of the evolution of legislative strength and institutionalization as well as a regional survey of legislative development under colonial rule, postcolonial autocratic single-party rule, and multiparty politics throughout Africa.

On the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence, Partition, and the creation of Pakistan, this ground breaking collection brings together fourteen cutting-edge scholarly essays on multiple aspects of both the region and the issue of Kashmir. While keeping the political dimensions of the dispute over the territory in focus, these innovative essays branch out from the high politics of the conflict to consider less well-known aspects and areas of Kashmir. They examine the continuities and ruptures between Kashmir's past and its present situation; reevaluate the contemporary political scenario from the perspective of gender, economic and political marginality, everyday experiences, and governance; and analyze the ways in which the region of Kashmir and its people are represented and (re)present themselves in films and literature through their regional and religious identities, and commodities. This volume aims to understand the limitations of postcolonial nationalism and citizenship as exemplified by the situation in contemporary Kashmir.

A comprehensive plan from two leading experts on how to fix America's outdated retirement system America's retirement system has serious problems. While it works well for some retirees, millions of others don't have the sound retirement they have worked decades to secure. Roughly 40 percent of today's $4 trillion federal budget is devoted to supporting retirees, which will grow to roughly half over the next decade-imperiling the sustainability of the whole system. The system is out of date. It reflects the America of a bygone age—an era in which company or union pensions provided middle-class families a decent standard of living in retirement. In America today, however, private pensions have mostly disappeared, Social Security is threatened to go insolvent, people are living longer, and health care costs continue to rise. Poorer retirees now must choose between buying enough to eat and their prescription drugs. In The Retirement Challenge, influential former White House economists Martin Neil Baily and Benjamin H. Harris explore America's outdated retirement system and explain how improving retirement requires changes by families, employers, and policymakers alike. Households need to save more, get smarter about their finances, and trade part of their 401(k) balances for insurance products. Companies need to take a more active role in their workers' retirements. And lawmakers need to amend the tax code, Social Security, and a host of other programs. Despite today's wide political divide, policymakers from both parties can come together around changes that will promote a stable retirement. This book shows that these changes do not represent a radical overhaul. If families, businesses, and policymakers do their part, everyone-current retirees and future generations-can enjoy a much more secure and prosperous retirement.

This book examines the remarkable increase of blacks at all levels of political life and makes the first systematic comparison of black and white elected officials. While observers have disagreed as to whether black politicians act differently from their white counterparts, little empirical work has been done because until recently there were few blacks in office. Leonard A. Cole's analysis of elected officials in New Jersey has an important bearing on the controversy. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Scottish Labour Party is in an unprecedented position. Having been the leading party in Scotland for fifty years it lost an election and office to the SNP in 2007. This book addresses, examines and analyses the last thirty years of Scottish Labour, from the arrival of Thatcherism in 1979 to the aftermath of the party's defeat in the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections. It asks fundamental questions about the nature of Scottish Labour, its dominance of Scottish politics, the wider politics of Scotland, and whether the decline is irreversible. Covering both contemporary events and recent history, it draws on extensive research including archival sources and interviews with some of the key participants in Scottish Labour.

The Scottish Labour Party is in an unprecedented position. Having been the leading party in Scotland for fifty years it lost an election and office to the SNP in 2007. This book addresses, examines and analyses the last thirty years of Scottish Labour, from the arrival of Thatcherism in 1979 to the aftermath of the party's defeat in the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections. It asks fundamental questions about the nature of Scottish Labour, its dominance of Scottish politics, the wider politics of Scotland, and whether the decline is irreversible. Covering both contemporary events and recent history, it draws on extensive research including archival sources and interviews with some of the key participants in Scottish Labour.

Are politics local? Why? Where? When? How do we measure local versus national politics? And what are the effects? This book provides answers to these questions, within an explicitly comparative framework, including both advanced and developing democracies. It does so by using a statistically-based and graphical account of party nationalization, providing methodology and data for legislative elections covering scores of parties across dozens of countries. The book divides party nationalization into two dimensions - static and dynamic - to capture different aspects of localism, both with important implications for representation. Static nationalization measures the consistency in a party's support across the country and thus shows whether parties are able to encompass local concerns into their platforms. Dynamic nationalization, in turn, measures the consistency among the districts in over-time change in electoral results, under the presumption that where districts differ in their electoral responses, local factors must drive politics. Each of the two dimensions, in sum, considers representation from the perspective of the mix of national versus local politics.

Winner of the John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award, Canada at a Crossroads draws on group position theory, settler colonial studies, critical race theory, and Indigenous theorizing. Canada at a Crossroads emphasizes the social psychological barriers to transforming white settler ideologies and practices and working towards decolonization. After tracing settlers' sense of group superiority and entitlement to historical and ongoing colonial processes, Denis illustrates how contemporary Indigenous and settler residents think about and relate to one another. He highlights how, despite often having close cross-group relationships, residents maintain conflicting perspectives on land, culture, history, and treaties, and Indigenous residents frequently experience interpersonal and systemic racism. Denis then critically assesses the promise and pitfalls of commonly proposed solutions, including intergroup contact, education, apologies, and collective action, and concludes that genuine reconciliation will require radically restructuring Canadian society and perpetually fulfilling treaty responsibilities.

"There is a vast literature on the illicit drugs, a large literature on nicotine, and nothing up-to-date and authoritative on the second most deadly, and arguably the most damaging, alcohol. Phil Cook, with a modesty and understatement that inspire trust, explores the options for reducing the harms, allowing the benefits, and respecting personal liberty. This is a masterly combination of analysis and evidence. It is also beautifully written."--Thomas C. Schelling, Nobel Prize-winning economist

"The war on tobacco was won: the harms were recognized and measures taken to reduce them. In this compelling book, Philip Cook shows that the war on alcohol, too, can be won if policymakers act on the overwhelming and converging evidence that simple measures can reduce the short-term and long-term harms caused by drinking. He brings order to a highly complicated set of causal issues by telling us what may be true, what is probably true, and what is indisputably true; and he shows how large gains can be made simply by taking account of the last set of facts."--Jon Elster, Columbia University

"This book contains the most thorough and penetrating analysis of alcohol-control policy to date. It is certain to become a landmark in the fields of health, economic, and public policy. It is a tour de force of virtually every aspect required to formulate sound policy in this crucial area. Bravo!"--Michael Grossman, City University of New York Graduate Center

"No previous book has brought alcohol policy issues together as comprehensively and set them in context as effectively as this one does. Perhaps most impressive is its author's ability to incorporate research from many fields and to translatethis evidence and the evidence from his original analyses into a book that is both highly readable and accessible to a wide audience--an audience ranging from policy researchers and policymakers to public health professionals, historians, economists, and general readers."--Frank J. Chaloupka, University of Illinois, Chicago, and director of ImpacTeen

""Paying the Tab" is unequivocally a major contribution to the field. Fully covering issues on both the supply and demand side of the market, with a wealth of new data, it provides the most comprehensive discussion of alcohol control that I am aware of. Economists will benefit tremendously from its presentation of the context for our current approach to the issue, and noneconomists will welcome the clear yet complete exposition of the methods used by economists to evaluate public policy."--Sara Markowitz, Rutgers University

On marijuana, there is no mutual federal-state policy; will this cause federalism to go up in smoke? More than one-half the 50 states have legalized the use of marijuana at least for medical purposes, and about a dozen of those states have gone further, legalizing it for recreational use. Either step would have been almost inconceivable just a couple decades ago. But marijuana remains an illegal "controlled substance" under a 1970 federal law, so those who sell or grow it could still face federal prosecution. How can state and federal laws be in such conflict? And could federal law put the new state laws in jeopardy at some point? This book, an edited volume with contributions by highly regarded legal scholars and policy analysts, is the first detailed examination of these and other questions surrounding a highly unusual conflict between state and federal policies and laws. Marijuana Federalism surveys the constitutional issues that come into play with this conflict, as well as the policy questions related to law enforcement at the federal versus state levels. It also describes specific areas such as banking regulations in which federal law has particularly far-reaching effects. Readers will gain a greater understanding of federalism in general, including how the division of authority between the federal and state governments operates in the context of policy and legal disputes between the two levels. This book also will help inform debates as other states consider whether to jump on the bandwagon of marijuana legalization.

This book fills an important niche in our understanding of scottish local government within the dynamic new context of the Scottish Parliament. It provides academics, students, practitioners, journalists and others with a broad-ranging yet detailed account of how local government actually works and the main political issues and debates surrounding its multi-faceted role in contemporary Scotland. It covers issues such as:

*The nature and purpose of Scottish local government

* The strengths and weaknesses of unitary authorities

*Modernization of political management arrangements

*Roles and remuneration for counselors

*Electoral reform and new methods for encouraging citizen participation

*The growth of non-elected local governance

*Best Value and the rise of the performance culture

*The politics of council finance: including business rates, Council Tax and PFI

*The wider context of central-local relations, multi-level governance and globalization

The book contains a wealth of facts, figures, tables and diagrams. In a supportive way the analysis draws on literature from the traditions of public policy, public administration and political science. The result is a modern and accessible analysis of Scottish local government in the context of devolution. A particular focus throughout is assessing the 'distinctiveness' of scottish local government compared to the rest of the UK, and addressing the question-to what extent has devolution made a difference to scottish local government?

Key Features:

* The only modern work of its kind-fills a gap in our understanding of local government in Scotland

* Accessible-offers the facts of how scottish local government works, combined with incisive political analysis

* Places scottish local government in the context of the Scottish Parliament, Westminster, the EU and an increasingly globalized world

In the super-heated anticommunist politics of the early Cold War period, American liberals turned to the FBI. With the Communist party to the left of them and McCarthyism to the right, liberal leaders saw the Bureau as the only legitimate instrument to define and protect the internal security interests of the state. McCarthyism provided ample proof of the dangers of security by congressional investigation. In response, liberals delegated extensive powers to J. Edgar Hoover--creating a domestic intelligence capacity that circumvented constitutional and legal controls. This balanced account of the link between liberal leaders in the United States and the growth of the FBI will appeal to a broad audience of readers interested in the American political climate. William Keller identifies a tension between liberalism and the security of the state that can never be fully resolved, and analyzes the exact mechanisms through which liberals and liberal government came to tolerate and even venerate an authoritarian state presence in their midst. The author shows how the liberal offensive against domestic communism succeeded both in weakening McCarthyism and in disabling the Communist party in the United States. What was the cost of these successes? Keller's answer assesses the liberal community's contribution to changes in the FBI between 1950 and 1970: its transformation into an independent, unaccountable political police. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The shut-down of Omaha, Nebraska's Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, raided by federal agencies in November 1988, sent shock waves all the way to Washington, D.C. $40 million was missing. The credit union's manager: Republican Party activist Lawrence E. "Larry" King, Jr., behind whose rise to fame and riches stood powerful figures in Nebraska politics and business, and in the nation's capital.
In the face of opposition from local and state law enforcement, from the FBI, and from the powerful "Omaha World-Herald" newspaper, a special Franklin committee of the Nebraska Legislature launched its own probe. What looked like a financial swindle, soon exploded into a hideous tale of drugs, Iran-Contra money-laundering, a nationwide child abuse ring, and ritual murder.
Nineteen months later, the legislative committee's chief investigator died - suddenly, and violently, like more than a dozen other people linked to the Franklin case.
Author John DeCamp knows the Franklin scandal from the inside. In 1990, his "DeCamp memo" first publicly named the alleged high-ranking abusers. Today, he is attorney for two of the abuse victims.
Using documentation never before made public, DeCamp lays bare not only the crimes, but the cover-up - a textbook case of how dangerous the corruption of institutions of government, and the press, can be. In its sweep and in what it portends for the nation, the Franklin cover-up followed the ugly precedent of the Warren Commission.

Why do authoritarian regimes survive? How do dictators fail? What role do political institutions play in these two processes? Many of the answers to these questions can be traced to the same source: the interaction between institutions and preferences. Using Egypt as a case study, Professor Mahmoud Hamad describes how the synergy between judges and generals created the environment for the present government and a delicate balance for its survival. The history of modern Egypt is one of the struggle between authoritarian governments, and forces that advocate for more democratic rights. While the military has provided dictatorial leaders, the judiciary provides judges who have the power to either support or stymie authoritarian power. Judges and Generals in the Making of Modern Egypt provides a historically grounded explanation for the rise and demise of authoritarianism, and is one of the first studies of Egypt's judicial institutions within a single analytical framework.

In the years following its near-bankruptcy in 1976 until the end of the 1980s, New York City came to epitomize the debt-driven, deal-oriented, economic boom of the Reagan era. Exploring the interplay between social structural change and political power during this period, John Mollenkopf asks why a city with a large minority population and a long tradition of liberalism elected a conservative mayor who promoted real-estate development and belittled minority activists. Through a careful analysis of voting patterns, political strategies of various interest groups, and policy trends, he explains how Mayor Edward Koch created a powerful political coalition and why it ultimately failed.

The history of eastern European is dominated by the story of the rise of the Russian empire, yet Russia only emerged as a major power after 1700. For 300 years the greatest power in Eastern Europe was the union between the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania, one of the longest-lasting political unions in European history. Yet because it ended in the late-eighteenth century in what are misleadingly termed the Partitions of Poland, it barely features in standard accounts of European history. The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union 1385-1569 tells the story of the formation of a consensual, decentralised, multinational, and religiously plural state built from below as much as above, that was founded by peaceful negotiation, not war and conquest. From its inception in 1385-6, a vision of political union was developed that proved attractive to Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, and Germans, a union which was extended to include Prussia in the 1450s and Livonia in the 1560s. Despite the often bitter disagreements over the nature of the union, these were nevertheless overcome by a republican vision of a union of peoples in one political community of citizens under an elected monarch. Robert Frost challenges interpretations of the union informed by the idea that the emergence of the sovereign nation state represents the essence of political modernity, and presents the Polish-Lithuanian union as a case study of a composite state. The modern history of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus cannot be understood without an understanding of the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian union. This volume is the first detailed study of the making of that union ever published in English.

"Mafia" has become an indigenous South Asian term. Like Italian mobsters, the South Asian "gangster politicians" are known for inflicting brutal violence while simultaneously upholding vigilante justice-inspiring fear and fantasy. But the term also refers to the diffuse spheres of crime, business, and politics operating within a shadow world that is popularly referred to as the rule of the mafia, or "Mafia Raj." Through intimate stories of the lives of powerful and aspiring bosses in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, this book illustrates their personal struggles for sovereignty as they climb the ladder of success. Ethnographically tracing the particularities of the South Asian case, the authors theorize what they call "the art of bossing," providing nuanced ideas about crime, corruption, and the lure of the strongman across the world.

In this lively study, Robert E. Shalhope supplies a fascinating microcosmic view of the rise and triumph of liberal individualism in America and explores its impact on political culture. Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Originally published in 1996. Americans who lived between the Revolution and Civil War felt the brunt of resounding and sometimes frightening changes, which together eventually influenced the political culture of early America. In this lively study, Robert E. Shalhope examines one of the changes most difficult to gauge and most controversial among students of the period-the rise and triumph of liberal individualism in America-and explores its impact on political culture. Taking Bennington, Vermont, and its environs as a case study, Shalhope untangles the clash among three competing elements in the community-the egalitarian communalism of the Strict Congregationalists; the democratic individualism of the revolutionary Green Mountain Boys; and the hierarchical authority of the community's Federalist gentlemen of property and standing. None of these players anticipated (and indeed did not wish for) the result-the emergence of democratic liberalism. Shalhope writes of class tension, economic competition, and religious differences-and ultimately of cultural conflict and political partisanship-and yet throughout uses individual life experiences to give the narrative piquancy and to emphasize the significance of seemingly small, personal decisions. Shalhope thus demonstrates how the private lives of ordinary people played a role in the settlement of public issues. As an account of a single town and how its residents responded to change, Bennington and the Green Mountain Boys supplies a fascinating microcosmic view of the larger story of how liberal America came to be.

"Mafia" has become an indigenous South Asian term. Like Italian mobsters, the South Asian "gangster politicians" are known for inflicting brutal violence while simultaneously upholding vigilante justice-inspiring fear and fantasy. But the term also refers to the diffuse spheres of crime, business, and politics operating within a shadow world that is popularly referred to as the rule of the mafia, or "Mafia Raj." Through intimate stories of the lives of powerful and aspiring bosses in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, this book illustrates their personal struggles for sovereignty as they climb the ladder of success. Ethnographically tracing the particularities of the South Asian case, the authors theorize what they call "the art of bossing," providing nuanced ideas about crime, corruption, and the lure of the strongman across the world.

Originally published in 1986. Political machines, and the bosses who ran them, are largely a relic of the nineteenth century. A prominent feature in nineteenth-century urban politics, political machines mobilized urban voters by providing services in exchange for voters' support of a party or candidate. Allswang examines four machines and five urban bosses over the course of a century. He argues that efforts to extract a meaningful general theory from the American experience of political machines are difficult given the particularity of each city's history. A city's composition largely determined the character of its political machines. Furthermore, while political machines are often regarded as nondemocratic and corrupt, Allswang discusses the strengths of the urban machine approach-chief among those being its ability to organize voters around specific issues.

Many developing countries have a history of highly centralized governments. Since the late 1980s, a large number of these governments have introduced decentralization to increase democracy and improve services, especially in small communities far from capital cities. In "Going Local," an unprecedented study of the effects of decentralization on thirty Mexican municipalities, Merilee Grindle describes how local governments respond when they are assigned new responsibilities and resources under decentralization policies. She explains why decentralization leads to better local governments in some cases--and why it fails to in others.

Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, Grindle examines data based on a random sample of Mexican municipalities--and ventures into town halls to follow public officials as they seek to manage a variety of tasks amid conflicting pressures and new expectations. Decentralization, she discovers, is a double-edged sword. While it allows public leaders to make significant reforms quickly, institutional weaknesses undermine the durability of change, and legacies of the past continue to affect how public problems are addressed. Citizens participate, but they are more successful at extracting resources from government than in holding local officials and agencies accountable for their actions. The benefits of decentralization regularly predicted by economists, political scientists, and management specialists are not inevitable, she argues. Rather, they are strongly influenced by the quality of local leadership and politics.

Much research has highlighted that sub-state entities (SSEs) - such as the German Lander, the Spanish autonomous communities, or the French regions - mobilise at the European level. This literature, however, is silent on how this sub-state activity interacts with that of its own member state. Do SSEs lobby in Brussels with their member state (cooperation), without their member state (non-interaction), or against their member state (conflict)? This book fills the current research gap by identifying what pattern of interaction between state and sub-state EU interest representation corresponds to, and by identifying what the determinants of such a pattern are. To achieve this, both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed. The quantitative section consists of regression analysis on data collected through a survey addressed to heads of regional offices in Brussels, and highlights that cooperation is the most frequent outcome, followed by non-interaction. Conflicting interest representation is the least frequent outcome. Further analysis reveals that devolution levels do not affect conflict but increase the frequency of cooperation and decrease that of non-interaction. Meanwhile, party political incongruence fails to affect conflict, decreases cooperation, and increases non-interaction. This quantitative work is complemented by a series of in-depth case study analyses of Scotland (UK), Salzburg (Austria), Rhone-Alpes and Alsace (both France). Based on over a hundred semi-structured interviews, the case studies, along with additional statistical testing, confirm the overall findings reached through quantitative means and further suggest that the effect of devolution overrides that of party political incongruence. Transformations in Governance is a major new academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series targets mainly single-authored or co-authored work, but it is pluralistic in terms of disciplinary specialization, research design, method, and geographical scope. Case studies as well as comparative studies, historical as well as contemporary studies, and studies with a national, regional, or international focus are all central to its aims. Authors use qualitative, quantitative, formal modeling, or mixed methods. A trade mark of the books is that they combine scholarly rigour with readable prose and an attractive production style. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the VU Amsterdam, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.

For this new edition, James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon have organized the book into six parts. Part I covers the origins and foundation of Canada as a political entity while Part II focuses on government, parliament, and the courts. Part III examines matters pertaining to federalism and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Part IV casts some new light on electoral politics and political communications and Part V examines citizenship, diversity, and social movements. Part VI, the final section of the book, concentrates on a number of political issues that merit special attention on the part of political actors and decision makers, namely the evolving relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples, immigration and refugees, environment and climate change, and relations between Canada and the United States. This seventh edition of Canadian Politics includes 12 new chapters, with ten new contributing authors and coverage of six new subjects, and is essential reading for students and specialists studying Canadian politics.

Here is the most thorough study to date on the impact of Ronald Reagan's policies on the states, especially the outcomes of his well-known budget cuts. A treasure trove of information that will be essential for interpretations of the Reagan presidency. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.