This timely Research Handbook offers a systematic and comprehensive examination of the election laws of democratic nations. Through a study of a range of different regimes of election law, it illuminates the disparate choices that societies have made concerning the benefits they wish their democratic institutions to provide, the means by which such benefits are to be delivered, and the underlying values, commitments, and conceptions of democratic self-rule that inform these choices. Comparative Election Law features a wide scope of coverage, from distribution of the franchise, to candidate qualifications, to campaign speech and finance, to election administration, and more. Contributions from a range of expert scholars in the field are brought together to tackle difficult problems surrounding the definition of the democratic demos, as well as to lay bare important disjunctions between democratic ideals and feasible democratic regimes in practice. Furthermore, a comparative approach is also taken to examine democratic regimes at a theoretical as well as a descriptive level. Featuring key research in a vitally important area, this Research Handbook will be crucial reading for academics and students in a range of fields including comparative law, legal theory, political science, political theory and democracy. It will also be useful to politicians and government officials engaged in election regulation, due to its excellent perspective on the range of regulatory options and how to evaluate them.

Object-oriented inheritance has been in widespread use for a decade, and it is now realised that although inheritance is a powerful modelling tool with many associated advantages, its benefits are not automatically conferred on systems that simply use it.This book introduces a model of inheritance based around five fundamental inheritance relationships. Each relationship has a clear conceptual basis, representing a fundamental, specialised use of inheritance. The resulting model replaces a confused notion of inheritance with five distinct conceptual relationships supporting more precise modelling of systems and capturing the semantic intent of each use of inheritance within a system.

This book investigates whether international standards of good governance are applied to sub-state actors as well as to states. By examining the international response to self-determination claims, this project demonstrates that the international community does indeed hold sub-state groups accountable to such standards. Claimant groups that have internalized human rights and democratic norms are more likely to receive international support in the form of empowerment (promoting some form of self-governance). To illustrate the causal forces at work, the book presents three qualitative case studies--Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Western Sahara--to demonstrate that predictable changes in the international response occur as international perception of each claimant group's democratic record varies over time.

What did independence mean during the age of empires? How did independent governments balance different interests when they made policies about trade, money and access to foreign capital? Sovereignty without Power tells the story of Liberia, one of the few African countries to maintain independence through the colonial period. Established in 1822 as a colony for freed slaves from the United States, Liberia's history illustrates how the government's efforts to exercise its economic sovereignty and engage with the global economy shaped Liberia's economic and political development over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing together a wide range of archival sources, Leigh A. Gardner presents the first quantitative estimates of Liberian's economic performance and uses these to compare it to its colonized neighbors and other independent countries. Liberia's history anticipated challenges still faced by developing countries today, and offers a new perspective on the role of power and power relationships in shaping Africa's economic history.

This book investigates whether international standards of good governance are applied to sub-state actors as well as to states. By examining the international response to self-determination claims, this project demonstrates that the international community does indeed hold sub-state groups accountable to such standards.

How much did the British Empire cost, and how did Britain pay for it? Taxing Colonial Africa explores a source of funds much neglected in research on the financial structure of the Empire, namely revenue raised in the colonies themselves. Requiring colonies to be financially self-sufficient was one of a range of strategies the British government used to lower the cost of imperial expansion to its own Treasury. Focusing on British colonies in Africa, Leigh Gardner examines how their efforts to balance their budgets influenced their relationships with local political stakeholders as well as the imperial government. She finds that efforts to balance the budget shaped colonial public policy at every level, and that compromises made in the face of financial constraints shaped the political and economic institutions that were established by colonial administrations and inherited by the former colonies at independence.
Using both quantitative data on public revenue and expenditure as well as archival records from archives in both the UK and the former colonies, Gardner follows the development of fiscal policies in British Africa from the beginning of colonial rule through the first years of independence. During the formative years of colonial administration, both the structure of taxation and the allocation of public spending reflected the two central goals of colonial rule: maintaining order as cheaply as possible and encouraging export production. Taxing Colonial Africa examines how the fiscal systems established before 1914 coped with the upheavals of subsequent decades, including the two World Wars, the Great Depression, and finally the transfer of power.

A guide for being fully equipped to succeed on the journey of life The Backpack: How to Understand and Manage Yourself While Loving Others Along the Way tells the story of Jon, Sofia, and Buddy whose pathways merge on a life-changing flight. Written by a senior consultant with the Flippen Group (a world-wide leader in self-awareness training), the book brings together an angry passenger, a wise flight attendant, and a down-home cowboy. Their chance meeting leads to the ride of their lives as they fully grasp the importance and meaning of their backpacks. As this engaging story reveals, self-awareness is like a backpack! If we are to be prepared to succeed on the journey of life, we need to know and accept which backpack is ours, decide what we need to put in it or take out of it, and be fully aware of how our backpacks are affecting all of the other passengers around us. The question is: Are we whacking the other passengers with our backpack as we travel through life. . . or are we helping them? Offers life lessons on self-awareness written in the form of a funny and engaging story Shows how we can lighten, fill and understand our "backpack" in order to lead a more successful life Written by a senior consultant with the Flippen Group The Backpack offers a story that explores the concepts of self-awareness and other-awareness, including the importance of appreciating your personality, living by your core values, mentally preparing for your day, being aware of your impact on others and packing your backpack wisely.

New Frontiers of State Constitutional Law: Dual Enforcement of Norms, edited by James A. Gardner and Jim Rossi, projects a new vision for state constitutional law through a collection of essays that reflect a shift in legal thinking about the relationship between national and subnational systems of constitutional law. This work charts a new course that gives voice to a recent, rising chorus of dissent among scholars and judges, namely that national and subnational systems of constitutional law cannot be adequately understood in isolation from one another. To the contrary, they are linked in a web of jurisprudential, social, and pragmatic connections structured by the American system of federalism. Here, multiple layers of constitutional law function together in a complex, interdependent process in which constitutional norms are developed, articulated, and enforced.
The essays illuminate the role that state constitutions must play in any theory of federalism, and exemplify a fresh approach to state constitutionalism by discussing a range of issues, including recent debates regarding state constitutional protections for same-sex marriage.
The entire work embraces the struggle between state and national power for dominance in American law and places both on equal ground. It contends that constitutional meaning in a federal system is never static and that it evolves over time. In addition to covering methods of judicial review, it discusses the handling of constitutional claims by courts at the state and national level and closely examines the way that courts and constitutions protect individual rights in a federal system.

Election campaigns ought to be serious occasions in the life of a democratic polity. For citizens of a democracy, an election is a time to take stock-to reexamine our beliefs; to review our understanding of our own interests; to ponder the place of those interests in the larger social order; and to contemplate, and if necessary to revise, our understanding of how our commitments are best translated into governmental policy-or so we profess to believe.
Americans, however, are haunted by the fear that our election campaigns fall far short of the ideal to which we aspire. The typical modern American election campaign seems crass, shallow, and unengaging. The arena of our democratic politics seems to lie in an uncomfortable chasm between our political ideals and everyday reality.
What Are Campaigns For? is a multidisciplinary work of legal scholarship that examines the role of legal institutions in constituting the disjunction between political ideal and reality. The book explores the contemporary American ideal of democratic citizenship in election campaigns by tracing it to its historical sources, documenting its thorough infiltration of legal norms, evaluating its feasibility in light of the findings of empirical social science, and testing it against the requirements of democratic theory.

Object-oriented inheritance has been in widespread use for a decade, and it is now realised that although inheritance is a powerful modelling tool with many associated advantages, its benefits are not automatically conferred on systems that simply use it. This book introduces a model of inheritance based around five fundamental inheritance relationships. Each relationship has a clear conceptual basis, representing a fundamental, specialised use of inheritance. The resulting model replaces a confused notion of inheritance with five distinct conceptual relationships supporting more precise modelling of systems and capturing the semantic intent of each use of inheritance within a system.