In the wake of the most unprecedented election result in recent memory, the question on everyone's lips is: what just happened to the UK's political landscape - and why? And who are the 182 new faces on the House of Commons benches?In The Politicos Guide to the New House of Commons 2015, public affairs consultant Tim Carr teams up with editors of the bestselling Politicos Guide to the 2015 General Election Iain Dale and Robert Waller to present an all-inclusive and essential post-election document for academics, journalists, students and political enthusiasts alike in the wake of the poll-defying 2015 general election.Wide-ranging and accessible, this essential guide provides, amongst much else:* Biographies of the class of 2015, alongside details of their majorities and constituencies;* Demographic analysis by age, gender, ethnic origin, education and background;* Lists of new marginal constituencies, possible targets seats, defeated MPs, and more;* Expert commentary from political journalists and pollsters, exploring the role of the media, the historic result in Scotland and the future impact of fixed-term parliaments.Ranging from the disastrous pre-election polls to the failure of UKIP to make a breakthrough - and the massacre of Scottish Labour - The Politicos Guide to the New House of Commons 2015 is a must-read for anyone eager to know the details of the election result that has so dramatically re-shaped the country's political landscape.

This book presents a set of original and innovative contributions on state, institutions and democracy in the field of political economy. Modern political economy has implied the interaction between politics and economics to understand political, electoral and public issues in different nations, and in this volume a group of leading political economists and political scientists from Europe, America and Asia provides theoretical advances, modelling and case studies on main topics in political economy. The analysis of the role and performance of politics and democracy in diverse nations implies the study of the organization of the state, lobbying, political participation, public policies, electoral politics, public administration and the provision of public services. This book provides advances in the research frontier of these topics and combines historical evidence, institutional analysis, mathematical models and empirical analysis in an interdisciplinary approach. Political and social scientists, economists and those interested in the performance of states, democracy and elections can find new research results in this volume.

Written by some of the foremost commentators on modern Europe who address a diverse range of problems: the continued blockage in historical and intellectual understanding between the two cultures; the conservative retrenchment in Western European politics; and the travail of perestroika in the former East Germany.

This book explores the following: What is the art of power? What is the art of French power? How did Charles de Gaulle understand and assert power, establishing the Fifth Republic and breaking centuries of political instability? How well or poorly have his successors wielded the art of French power to define, defend, or enhance French interests?

Morreale traces the development of the documentary films produced for presidential candidates from Calvin Coolidge in 1923 to George Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992. The work provides insight into today's visually oriented presidential campaign by analyzing the production of candidates' images as the films evolve from classical to modern forms. Campaign films are usually overlooked by campaign scholars, yet they provide the fullest available visual portrait of a candidate during a campaign, they encapsulate persuasive appeals and strategies, and they illustrate Republican and Democratic candidates' different approaches to mediated communication. Morreale concludes that presidential campaign films provide a lens through which we can view both changes and continuities in American politics and culture. Recommended for scholars and students of communication, political science, and history.

This book provides a comprehensive account of national parliaments' adaptation to European integration. Advancing an explanation based on political parties' constitutional preferences, the volume investigates the nature and variation of parliamentary rights in European Union affairs across countries and levels of governance. In some member states, parliaments have traditionally been strong and parties hold intergovernmental visions of European integration. In these countries, strong parliamentary rights emerge in the context of parties' efforts to realise their preferred constitutional design for the European polity. Parliamentary rights remain weakly developed where federally-oriented parties prevail, and where parliaments have long been marginal arenas in domestic politics. Moreover, divergent constitutional preferences underlie inter-parliamentary disagreement on national parliaments' collective rights at the European level. Constitutional preferences are key to understanding why a 'Senate' of national parliaments never enjoyed support and why the alternatives subsequently put into place have stayed clear of committing national parliaments to any common policies. This volume calls into question existing explanations that focus on strategic partisan incentives arising from minority and coalition government. It, furthermore rejects the exclusive attribution of parliamentary 'deficits' to the structural constraints created by European integration and, instead, restores a sense of accountability for parliamentary rights to political parties and their ideas for the European Union's constitutional design.

The rough-hewn general who rose to the nation's highest office, and whose presidency witnessed the first political skirmishes that would lead to the Civil War

Zachary Taylor was a soldier's soldier, a man who lived up to his nickname, "Old Rough and Ready." Having risen through the ranks of the U.S. Army, he achieved his greatest success in the Mexican War, propelling him to the nation's highest office in the election of 1848. He was the first man to have been elected president without having held a lower political office.

John S. D. Eisenhower, the son of another soldier-president, shows how Taylor rose to the presidency, where he confronted the most contentious political issue of his age: slavery. The political storm reached a crescendo in 1849, when California, newly populated after the Gold Rush, applied for statehood with an anti- slavery constitution, an event that upset the delicate balance of slave and free states and pushed both sides to the brink. As the acrimonious debate intensified, Taylor stood his ground in favor of California's admission--despite being a slaveholder himself--but in July 1850 he unexpectedly took ill, and within a week he was dead. His truncated presidency had exposed the fateful rift that would soon tear the country apart.

The proverbial Soviet enigma has never seemed more elusive to Western analysts than now. General Secretary GorbacheV's demonstrated willingness to reallocate resources, the upheavals in the internal Soviet system wrought by perestroika and glasnost, and a new strategic reliance on defensive sufficiency may all have profound implications for U.S.-Soviet relations in the future. In this volume, distinguished academics, researchers, and government and military strategists look ahead to the 1990s and examine probable trends in the superpower relationship over the course of the next decade. An excellent source of readings for courses in international relations, national security, and foreign policy, the book focuses particularly on the strategic and military aspects of the relationship.

The book is divided into four parts and begins by addressing concepts of strategy. The contributors outline U.S. strategic practice and Soviet global objectives in the context of nuclear deterrence and major conventional wars. In Part II, three chapters discuss the U.S. response to the Soviet threat in terms of U.S. strategy for war in Europe, strategic defense policies, and technology and policy choices. Low intensity conflicts, both unconventional conflicts and Third World involvements, are the subject of Part III. Finally, the contributors assess Soviet military power and U.S. defense resources, examining the question of which nation is currently better prepared to outlast the other in a protracted conflict. A concluding chapter ties the readings together by examining whether the Soviet challenge of the 1990s can best be characterized as peacefully offensive or as operational entrapment.

The notion of society and politics as drama has drawn much attention in recent years. Yet despite the heritage begun by Aristophanes, few students of politics and the social order have taken comedy and comic inquiry seriously. This book revives the Aristophanic notion of democracy as comedy. Herein the reader will find why and how different aspects of American democracy--public opinion, interest groups, the presidency, and so on--are comic. It is the author's contention that the comic perspective offers insight and understanding on the actual operation of democracy. And they invite all those who wish to understand why American democracy is so comic to join them in their inquiry.

Neoliberalism Reloaded: Authoritarian Governmentality and the Rise of the Radical Right analyzes the violent enforcement of neoliberal governmentality and its relationship to the emergence of a new political and cultural Right that combines political authoritarianism, ethnocentric nationalism, racism, misogyny, and antifeminism with neoliberal economic principles. Many critical thinkers have defined this post-2008 crisis phase as a fascist moment of neoliberalism since far-Right movements and parties are not only enhancing their political representation but also setting the agenda of today's politics. However, such a crucial political moment needs more precise analytical tools. In this framework, Neoliberalism Reloaded: Authoritarian Governmentality and the Rise of the Radical Right seeks to understand the emergence of the New Right and punitive neoliberalism not only as a reaction to a crisis of accumulation but also as an outcome of neoliberal reason and the historical neoliberal alliance with conservative and reactionary political forces. Therefore, far from thinking this moment as exceptional, this book seeks the roots of today's punitive neoliberalism in its theoretical framework and in the violence inherent to neoliberal capitalism towards those racialized, colonized, genderized and precarized populations that cannot adjust to the norm of competitiveness. Thus, Neoliberalism Reloaded seeks to contribute to understanding the challenges of our present as a necessary step to imagine alternative futures.

Citizens, journalists, and watchdog organizations claim that U.S. Congress members serve special interest groups in return for lucrative jobs in industry once they leave office-and that these legislators become lax in their final term of office as they are no longer compelled by elections to provide quality representation to citizens. This book investigates the veracity of these claims. The established consensus among scholars and citizens groups is that democracy suffers when U.S. Congress members prepare to leave office-that legislators are quick to satisfy pressure groups' requests in part because they anticipate being rewarded with financially compelling positions in those organizations once they leave office. But is this actually true? Focusing on 346 of the senators and representatives who left office during the 107th through 111th Congresses (January 2001 to January 2011), this book makes a counterintuitive argument: that job-seeking legislators provide stalwart service to citizens during their final term of office for fear of damaging their reputations and imperiling their post-Congressional career prospects. After an introductory chapter, author Matthew S. Dabros summarizes past research on political opportunism before discussing how nonelectoral constraints imposed by special interests (namely, diminished post-Congressional employment opportunities) actually encourage job-seeking legislators to provide quality representation to citizens even in their final term in office. The book also describes the nature and identifies the determinants of post-Congressional careers. The chapters use numerous contemporary examples and draw parallels to topics familiar to general readers to ensure that the book is highly accessible and interesting to nonspecialists. Offers a timely and fact-based perspective on the relationship between legislators and special interest organizations, one in which special interests constrain-not exploit-lawmakers' opportunistic proclivities Documents how the fear of diminished post-office employment opportunities compels legislators to supply quality representation rather than succumb to opportunism in the final term of officeholding and in the absence of electoral constraints Reveals that post-Congressional careers entail more than just lobbying through an up-to-date accounting of the career decisions of almost every senator and representative who left office between 2001 and 2011 Investigates and identifies the major factors that prompt legislators to remain in public service, take up a career in lobbying or elsewhere in the private sector, or retire from work altogether

Recent decades have seen growing concern regarding problems of electoral integrity. The most overt malpractices used by rulers include imprisoning dissidents, harassing adversaries, coercing voters, vote-rigging counts, and even blatant disregard for the popular vote. Elsewhere minor irregularities are common, exemplified by inaccurate voter registers, maladministration of polling facilities, lack of security in absentee ballots, pro-government media bias, ballot miscounts, and gerrymandering. Serious violations of human rights that undermine electoral credibility are widely condemned by domestic observers and the international community. Recent protests about integrity have mobilized in countries as diverse as Russia, Mexico, and Egypt. However, long-standing democracies are far from immune to these ills; past problems include the notorious hanging chads in Florida in 2000 and more recent accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression during the Obama-Romney contest. When problems come to light, however, is anyone held to account and are effective remedies implemented? In response to these developments, there have been growing attempts to analyze flaws in electoral integrity and transparency using systematic data from cross-national time-series, forensic analysis, field experiments, case studies, and new instruments monitoring mass and elite perceptions of malpractices. This volume collects essays from international experts who evaluate the robustness, conceptual validity, and reliability of the growing body of evidence. The essays compare alternative approaches and apply these methods to evaluate the quality of elections in several areas, including the United States, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Election Watchdogs:Transparency, Accountability and Integrity presents new insights into the importance of diverse actors who promote electoral transparency, accountability, and ultimately the integrity of electoral governance.

This book examines how social cleavage lines shape issue voting and party competition. Based on a study of German elections between 1980 and 1994, it analyzes whether cleavage group members put more weight on policies that address their personal self-interest than voters who are not affected by the cleavage line. Furthermore, it analyzes the consequences of cleavage groups' deviating patterns of voting behavior for the formal game of party competition. More concretely, the author asks whether equilibrium positions of parties within the policy space are pulled away from the mean due to the more extreme policy demands of cleavage groups in the electorate.

Spring 2008 witnessed the first positive signs of a thaw in relations between the two sides of the divided island of Cyprus since the dramatic failure of the Annan Plan in 2004. The historic meeting of the two Presidents of Cyprus and the symbolic opening of the Ledra Street border crossing in the heart of Nicosia may herald a bright new future for this Mediterranean island. Yet Cyprus has been in this situation before. What makes this new initiative different and why should it succeed where so many others have failed?

"Reunifying Cyprus" is the first book to analyze fully the reasons for the continuing failure to re-unite the two states of Cyprus after over forty years of division. It focuses especially on the Annan Plan--the popular name for the UN initiative to find a "Comprehensive Solution to the Cyprus Problem in anticipation of Cyprus" accession to the EU--and the reasons for its ultimate failure. How did Cypriots receive the Annan Plan? What were the real or imagined flaws? Was this a missed opportunity? And what place does the Annan Plan have in future blueprints to reunify the island?

"Reunifying Cyprus" will be invaluable for anyone interested in conflict resolution and international politics as well as students of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The twentieth century has been described as the bloodiest in human history, but it was also the century in which people around the world embraced ideas of democracy and human rights as never before. They constructed social, political and legal institutions seeking to contain human behaviour, ensuring that by the turn of the twenty- first century more countries were democratic than non-democratic and the protection of human rights had been extended far beyond the expectations of the creators of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Todd Landman offers an optimistic, yet cautionary tale of these developments, drawing on the literature from politics, international relations and international law. He celebrates the global turn from tyranny and violence towards democracy and rights but he also warns of the precariousness of these achievements in the face of democratic setbacks and the undermining of rights commitments by many countries during the controversial "War on Terror."

Drawing on research from the administrative sciences and using organizational, institutional and decision-making theories, this volume examines the emerging bureaucratic framework of the EU and highlights that analyzing the patterns and dynamics of the EU's administrative capacities is essential to understand how it shapes European public policy.

The eighth volume in Frederick Madden's monumental documentary history of the British Empire, this volume deals with some of the dependencies--the West Indies, British Honduras, Hong Kong, Fiji, Cyprus, Gibraltar and the Falklands--since 1948. Using documentary materials, as in the earlier volumes, the book illustrates the progress toward self-government and independence, including, for instance, the development of communal tensions in Cyprus and the de facto division of the island, and the handing back of Hong Kong to China. The volume also includes Madden's valedictory summary and overview of the evolution of imperial government in the dependencies covered in these volumes, beginning with the Anglo-Norman empire of the 12th century. Along with the earlier volumes, this book provides a valuable resource for researchers interested in British imperialism.

Once a most unlikely candidate, Barack Obama's successful campaign for the White House made him a worldwide sensation and a transformative figure even before he was inaugurated. Elected as the Iraq War and Great Recession discouraged millions of Americans, Obama's promise of hope revived the national spirit. Had he only saved the economy, Obama would be considered a truly successful president. However he has achieved so much more, against ferocious opposition, that he can be counted as one of the most consequential presidents in history. With health care reform, he ended a crisis of escalating costs and inadequate access that threatened 50 million people. His energy policies drove down the cost of power generated by the sun, wind, and even fossil fuels. His climate change efforts produced the first treaty to address global warming in a meaningful way, and his diplomacy produced a dramatic reduction in the nuclear threat posed by Iran. Add the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the normalisation of relations with Cuba, and the "pivot" toward Asia, and his successes abroad match those at home. In A Consequential President, Michael D'Antonio tallies Obama's long record of achievement, both his major successes and less-noticed ones that nevertheless contribute to his legacy. Obama's greatest achievement came as he restored dignity and ethics to the office of the president, proof that he delivered the hope and change he promised.

Why are democracies so unequal? Despite the widespread expectation that democracy, via expansion of the franchise, would lead to redistribution in favor of the masses, in reality majorities regularly lose out in democracies. Taking a broad view of inequality as encompassing the distribution of wealth, risk, status, and well-being, this volume explores how institutions, individuals, and coalitions contribute to the often surprising twists and turns of distributive politics.

The contributors hail from a range of disciplines and employ an array of methodologies to illuminate the central questions of democratic distributive politics: What explains the variety of welfare state systems, and what are their prospects for survival and change? How do religious beliefs influence peopleas demand for redistribution? When does redistributive politics reflect public opinion? How can different and seemingly opposed groups successfully coalesce to push through policy changes that produce new winners and losers?

The authors identify a variety of psychological and institutional factors that influence distributive outcomes. Taken together, the chapters highlight a common theme: politics matters. In seeking to understand the often puzzling contours of distribution and redistribution, we cannot ignore the processes of competition, bargaining, building, and destroying the political alliances that serve as bridges between individual preferences, institutions, and policy outcomes.

In this study of the British labor movement, Joel Wolfe asks whether participatory democracy is possible in modern large-scale union and party organizations and how rank and file members can exercise control of delegates in the face of constraints imposed by formal bureaucratic structures at all levels. In addressing these questions he formulates a theory of participatory democracy that has broad practical application to contemporary democratic practice in industiral and political organizations. He tests his model through an analysis of the policy-making process in the British labor movement during World War I, examining thoroughly and critically direct democracy in wartime work groups, the impact of these groups on policy-making in critical areas, and their influence on decision-makers in the Trades Union Congress and the British Labor Party.

In 1602, the States General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands chartered the first commercial company, the Dutch East India Company, and, in so doing, initiated a new wave of globalization. Even though Dutch engagement in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans dates back to the 16th century, it was the dawn of the 17th century that brought the Dutch into the fold of the general movement of European expansion overseas and concomitant globalization. This volume surveys the Dutch participation in, and contribution to, the process of globalization. At the same time, it reassesses the various ways Dutchmen fashioned themselves following the encounter and in the light of increasing dialogue with other societies across the world. As such, Exploring the Dutch Empire offers a new insight into the macro and micro worlds of the global Dutchman in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The result fills a gap in the historiography on empire and globalization, which has previously been dominated by British and, to a lesser extent, French and Spanish cases.

Co-published by Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, University of California, Berkeley & National Taiwan University Press. Taiwan Since Martial Law epitomizes the reinvigoration of cultural pluralism, which characterizes the dynamic processes of democratized Taiwan. With the lifting of martial law in 1987, people have awakened to their respective cultural identities and contributed to a sociopolitical renaissance strengthening the island's sense of national destiny and commitment to self-determination. Nineteen chapters highlight Taiwan's social and cultural diversity and the complexities of its politics and economy. The preface by Bo Tedards depicts the avenues of Taiwan's democratization with his 'trajectories' of political alternatives. The opening chapter by the editor David Blundell traces his personal experiences during the martial law transition and his reflections on an emerging Taiwan "sense of place." Pro-democracy activists organized to demand free elections, human rights, respect for local heritages, and environmental sustainability.

This collection of twenty essays, written by an array of internationally prestigious scholars, is a ground-breaking work which raises serious and profound concerns about the entrenchment of human rights generally and into UK law in particular. This is the only book on the market to take a sceptical approach to recent developments in human rights law. Written throughout in an engaging and accessible style, this book is essential reading for all those with an interest in law or politics.