The Citizen Soldiers explores the military reform movement that took its name from the famous Business Men's Military Training Camps at Plattsburg, New York. It also illuminates the story of two exceptional men: General Leonard Wood, the rambunctious and controversial former Rough Rider who galvanized the Plattsburg Idea with his magnetic personality; and Grenville Clark, a young Wall Street lawyer.

The Plattsburg camps strove to advertise the lack of military preparation in the United States and stressed the military obligation every man owed to his country. Publicized by individuals who voluntarily underwent military training, the preparedness movement rapidly took shape in the years prior to America's entry into the First World War. Far from being war hawks, the Plattsburg men emphasized the need for a "citizen army" rather than a large professional establishment. Although they failed in their major objective -- universal military training -- their vision of a citizen army was largely realized in the National Defense Act of 1920, and their efforts helped to establish selective service as the United States' preferred recruitment method in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.

Featuring a new preface by the author, this new edition of a seminal study will hit shelves just in time for the World War I Centennial.

This pioneering analysis uses the results from the first ever Irish election study to provide a comprehensive survey of the motives, outlook and behaviour of voters in the Republic of Ireland. Building on the foundations laid down by previous work on comparative electoral behaviour, it explores long-term influences on vote choice, such as party loyalties and enduring values, as well as short-term ones, such as the economy, the party leaders and the candidates themselves. It also examines how people use their vote and why so many people do not vote at all. Many features of Irish elections make such a detailed study particularly important. The single transferable vote system allows voters an unusual degree of freedom to pick the candidates they prefer, while electoral trends observed elsewhere can be found in a more extreme form in Ireland. For example, attachment to parties is very low, differences between them are often obscure, candidate profiles are very high and turnout is falling rapidly. However, Irish elections defy international trends in other respects, most notably in the degree of personal contact parties and candidates make with their voters. Findings are presented in a manner that is highly accessible to anyone with an interest in elections, electoral systems and electoral behaviour. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in Irish politics and is an important text for students of European Politics, Parties and Elections, Comparative Politics and Political Sociology. -- .

For thirty years, Northern Ireland was riven by sustained ethnonationalist conflict over the issue of whether the territory should remain part of the United Kingdom or reunify with the Republic of Ireland. The 1998 Belfast or "Good Friday" Agreement brought peace to the region by instituting a consociational government, which acknowledged the political differences between nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland and established a legislative body characterized by power-sharing between the region's political parties. In Consociation and Voting in Northern Ireland, the first study to address electoral behaviors and opinions in a power-sharing society, John Garry interrogates the democratic efficacy of Northern Ireland's consociational government. John Garry investigates the electoral period between 2007-when all of Northern Ireland's major political parties joined the power-sharing government-and 2011 and analyzes postelection survey data to assess the democratic behavior of Northern Irish voters. The evidence is used to address the following questions: How democratic is a consociational government? If all the main parties are in the government, and there are no opposition parties per se, is it possible for voters to hold the government to account? Do power-sharing structures simply perpetuate underlying divisions in the constituency? And since consociational power sharing relies on agreements between senior politicians, can citizens end up feeling disillusioned and, therefore, disinclined to vote? In the process of answering these questions, Garry presents new information on shifting identity formations in Northern Ireland and extends his analysis to the implications of power-sharing agreements for other nations.