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“A must-read for anyone concerned about the fate of contemporary democracies.”—Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Why divisions have deepened and what can be done to heal them As one part of the global democratic recession, severe political polarization is increasingly afflicting old and new democracies alike, producing the erosion of democratic norms and rising societal anger. This volume is the first book-length comparative analysis of this troubling global phenomenon, offering in-depth case studies of countries as wide-ranging and important as Brazil, India, Kenya, Poland, Turkey, and the United States. The case study authors are a diverse group of country and regional experts, each with deep local knowledge and experience. Democracies Divided identifies and examines the fissures that are dividing societies and the factors bringing polarization to a boil. In nearly every case under study, political entrepreneurs have exploited and exacerbated long-simmering divisions for their own purposes—in the process undermining the prospects for democratic consensus and productive governance. But this book is not simply a diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Each case study discusses actions that concerned citizens and organizations are taking to counter polarizing forces, whether through reforms to political parties, institutions, or the media. The book’s editors distill from the case studies a range of possible ways for restoring consensus and defeating polarization in the world’s democracies. Timely, rigorous, and accessible, this book is of compelling interest to civic activists, political actors, scholars, and ordinary citizens in societies beset by increasingly rancorous partisanship.
Developing countries commonly adopt reforms to improve their governments yet they usually fail to produce more functional and effective governments. Andrews argues that reforms often fail to make governments better because they are introduced as signals to gain short-term support. These signals introduce unrealistic best practices that do not fit developing country contexts and are not considered relevant by implementing agents. The result is a set of new forms that do not function. However, there are realistic solutions emerging from institutional reforms in some developing countries. Lessons from these experiences suggest that reform limits, although challenging to adopt, can be overcome by focusing change on problem solving through an incremental process that involves multiple agents.
The global movement toward democracy, spurred in part by the ending of the cold war, has created opportunities for democratization not only in Europe and the former Soviet Union, but also in Africa. This book is based on workshops held in Benin, Ethiopia, and Namibia to better understand the dynamics of contemporary democratic movements in Africa. Key issues in the democratization process range from its institutional and political requirements to specific problems such as ethnic conflict, corruption, and role of donors in promoting democracy. By focusing on the opinion and views of African intellectuals, academics, writers, and political activists and observers, the book provides a unique perspective regarding the dynamics and problems of democratization in Africa.
Democracy today faces deep and complex challenges, especially when it comes to political communication and the quality of public discourse. Dishonest and manipulative communication amplified by unscrupulous politicians and media pervades these diabolical times, enabling right-wing populism, extremism, truth denial, and authoritarianism to flourish. To tackle these issues, we need to encourage meaningful deliberative communication – creating spaces for reflective and constructive dialogue, repairing unhealthy public spheres while preserving healthier ones, and building discursive bridges across deep divides. Citizens who see through elite manipulations should be at the core of this response, especially if bad elite behavior is to be effectively constrained. Democratic activists and leaders, diverse interpersonal networks, resilient public spheres, deliberative innovations and clever communication strategies all have vital roles to play in both defending and renewing democracy. Healthy discursive infrastructures can make democracies work again.
Political accountability is a crucial element of any democracy since it is a safeguard against power abuse and corruption, both urgent problems of many political systems in Southeast Asia. Based on social science theories, the author analyses from a comparative perspective the ways institutional engineering concerning different dimensions of political accountability influenced the quality of democracy in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. By highlighting the successes and shortcomings, this book evaluates the degree these institutional reforms resulted in the deepening, stagnation, or regression of the respective democratization processes in these three Southeast Asian countries.
The Euro Area is ten years old. This major new reappraisal by some of the world's leading scholars examines the effects of the new European single currency on the member states of the European Union in its first decade.
This book is unique. It raises the issue “What ails India and Indian democracy” and attempts to provide a perspective – its riddles and paradoxes in India’s context and content. If the reader believes that Indian democracy is vibrant and resilient despite numerous threats enveloping the nation, the author has made prescriptions to bail it out. With the theme as “Democracy in Peril”, this book is thought provoking for all alike. Through an incisive analyses of evolution and growth of democracy as a political order, the author provides an intriguing insight into today’s political developments – power politics and turf wars - and adversarial postures both intra and inter political party’s and leaders conflicts and crises. Call them challenges or threats, democratic institutions are at war with each other, leadership vacuum is real and there is widening trust deficit between the leaders and the people. The author has provided enough evidence through mapping the ‘ills’ tormenting Indian democracy and prescribing changes necessary to its structures, actors and processes, as reforms or refinements, lest the nation gets swept by violent revolution. His review of leadership crisis contributing to policy paralysis and virtual breakdown of functioning of Parliament and Legislatures due to adversarial and acrimonious confrontations both inside and outside are quite exhaustive. The author blames the murky electoral processes and how they have adversely influenced and governed the behavior of elected representatives in smooth and effective functioning of the Parliament and Legislatures in the conduct of business. He suggests that the struggle to tackle numerous challenges and threats emerging ever more appears to be a mirage and beyond the competence of present day self-centric leadership within the framework of the First Republic. Few of the key issues addressed in Part 3 are comprehensive emphasizing the need for action. By synthesizing his thoughts and reflections extending over six decades – from undergrad student of political science and history to national security strategy research scholar – the author has produced a book of “par excellence” quality from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Its end purpose is simple – to impress the reader to understand the present political travails tormenting the nation and find appropriate solutions. A must read book for all alike.
This is the first comprehensive history of conscription and the military in Italy from the Restoration to the eve of WWI. The comparative and transnational approach enables this work to compare and contrast the Italian experience with that of many other countries in the world as well as understand transfers and the adaptive and imitative processes that emerge when conscription and the military are viewed from an Italian perspective. Peacetime and wartime recruitment, military life, culture, justice and civil-military relationships are analysed using a wide range of sources and an interdisciplinary approach that combines top-down and bottom-up perspectives. This enables the book not only to assess the contribution the military has made to the country in terms of state-building, nation building, modernization, pedagogical and disciplinary models, gender identity and roles, but also to reconsider the standard taxonomies as well as some established evolutionary models of the armies. Moreover, the Italian military is seen as an internally complex world that is incapable of defining its own one-dimensional identity or of imposing any such identity on its members. Consequently, it is an element in the history of a country that is substantially the same as any other such element and thus important in people’s collective and individual lives whether or not they are in uniform. Rather than being an object of study in and of itself, the military becomes a vantage point from which to observe the Italian history in the long 19th century. Therefore, this book can be profitably read by professional military historians and non-specialist readers interested in the military, as well as by all scholars working on Italian pre- and post-unification political, institutional, socio-economic, cultural and gender history.
This Handbook provides a systematic overview of the study of policy styles provided by leading experts in the field. The book unites theoretical bases and advancements in practice, ranging from the fundamentals of policy styles to its place in greater policy studies, and responds to new questions regarding policy style dynamics across a range of government levels and activities, including contemporary trends affecting styles such as the use of digital tools and big data in government. It is a comprehensive reference for students and scholars of public policy. Key features: consolidates and advances the contemporary body of knowledge on policy styles and defines its distinctiveness within broader policy studies; provides a detailed picture of national policy styles in a wide range of countries as well as insights concerning sectoral and other kinds of styles within countries, including executive styles and styles of policy advice; systematically explores questions dealing with how policy styles impact policy goals, and the realization of policies, including how styles affect instruments choices and impact; provides a guide to future comparative research pathways and cross-sectoral dialogue on the concept and practice of policy styles. The Routledge Handbook Policy Styles is essential reading and an authoritative reference for scholars, students, researchers and practitioners of public policy, public administration, public management as well as for comparative politics and government, public organizations and individual policy areas such as health policy, welfare policy, industrial policy, environmental policy, among others.