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Three out of five Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, feel our country is headed in the wrong direction. America is at the edge, a critical place at which we can either renew and revitalize or give in and lose that most precious American ideal--democracy--and along with it the freedom, fairness, and opportunities it assures. Democracy's Edge is a rousing battle cry that we can--and must--act now. From Jefferson to Eisenhower, presidents from both parties have warned us of the danger of letting a closed, narrow group of business and government officials concentrate power over our lives. Yet today, a small and unrepresentative group of people is making vital decisions for all of us. But this crisis is only a symptom, Lappé argues. It's a symptom of thin democracy, something done to us or for us, not by or with us. Such democracy is always at risk of being stolen by private interests or extremist groups, left and right. But there is a solution. The answer, says Lappé, is Living Democracy, a powerful yet often invisible citizens' revolution surging in communities across America. It's not random, disjointed activism but the emergence of a new historical stage of democracy in which Americans realize that democracy isn't something we have but something we do. Either we live it or lose it, says Lappé.
This 2007 book studies the impact of the media on politics in the United States during the last half-century.
Offering a fascinating biography of a foundational theory, Amadae reveals not only how the ideological battles of the Cold War shaped ideas but also how those ideas may today be undermining the very notion of individual liberty they were created to defend.
Why our belief in government by the people is unrealistic—and what we can do about it Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate that voters—even those who are well informed and politically engaged—mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly. Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters. Now with new analysis of the 2016 elections, Democracy for Realists provides a powerful challenge to conventional thinking, pointing the way toward a fundamentally different understanding of the realities and potential of democratic government.
This text is appropriate for any course in Multicultural Education or Multicultural Curriculum. This book takes a strong social reconstructionist approach in advocating democratic school reform. It focuses on empowerment and provides detailed descriptions of teaching strategies to achieve it. Based on the experiences of hundreds of future teachers in multicultural education courses, this text offers concrete teaching alternatives that can be used in the classroom to respond to the issues of racism, sexism, gender, and class bias.* NEW-Emphasizes democratic, as opposed to arbitrary, forms of management, in the significantly revised chapter titled Democracy and Classroom Management. * Students are guided to develop their management systems based upon democratic theory. * NEW-Features seven contributors to the text. * Brings increased diversity to the topics of race relations, gender, language acquisition, standards as a strategy for reform, and the analysis of school reform efforts. * NEW-Updates economic data. * Reflects the issues of international economic competition. * NEW-Adds new biographies and related activities. * Encourages students to write their own lessons using critic
How can we design places that fulfill urgent needs of the community, achieve environmental justice, and inspire long-term stewardship? By bringing community members to the table with designers to collectively create vibrant, important places in cities and neighborhoods. For decades, participatory design practices have helped enliven neighborhoods and promote cultural understanding. Yet, many designers still rely on the same techniques that were developed in the 1950s and 60s. These approaches offer predictability, but hold waning promise for addressing current and future design challenges. Design as Democracy is written to reinvigorate democratic design, providing inspiration, techniques, and case stories for a wide range of contexts. Edited by six leading practitioners and academics in the field of participatory design, with nearly 50 contributors from around the world, it offers fresh insights for creating meaningful dialogue between designers and communities and for transforming places with justice and democracy in mind.
In this critique of rational choice theory, Emily Hauptmann explores the idea central to the theory, namely, that democracy can best be explained in terms of an economic conception of choice. Her argument turns on the claims that the choices we face as citizens are not reducible to the choices we face as consumers and that democracy cannot be reduced to a series of choices, economic or otherwise.
A review of the consequences for political science of Anthony Downs's seminal work.
The mathematical theory of voting has intellectual roots extending back two centuries to the writings of Borda and Condorcet. Yet it has only been in the last forty years that general theorems have begun to emerge. With the publication of this volume, Norman Schofield brings the results together in a ,common framework. SOCIAL CHOICE AND DEMOCRACY, however, is not merely a synthetic exercise, for Schofield's own work over the last decade has constituted a major initiative in deepening and' broadening our general understanding of voting arrangements. At last the results of his research, bits and pieces of which have been reported in a number of journals of international standing and in various collections, are coherently and systematically presented as an entirety. For students of democracy -- chiefly philosophers and political scientists, but increasingly economists as well -- the insights of this volume are profound. From it I infer the following.