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The rise of populism in the West and the rise of China in the East have stirred a rethinking of how democratic systems work—and how they fail. The impact of globalism and digital capitalism is forcing worldwide attention to the starker divide between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” challenging how we think about the social contract. With fierce clarity and conviction, Renovating Democracy tears down our basic structures and challenges us to conceive of an alternative framework for governance. To truly renovate our global systems, the authors argue for empowering participation without populism by integrating social networks and direct democracy into the system with new mediating institutions that complement representative government. They outline steps to reconfigure the social contract to protect workers instead of jobs, shifting from a “redistribution” after wealth to “pre-distribution” with the aim to enhance the skills and assets of those less well-off. Lastly, they argue for harnessing globalization through “positive nationalism” at home while advocating for global cooperation—specifically with a partnership with China—to create a viable rules-based world order. Thought provoking and persuasive, Renovating Democracy serves as a point of departure that deepens and expands the discourse for positive change in governance.
The rise of populism in the West and the rise of China in the East have stirred a rethinking of how democratic systems work—and how they fail. The impact of globalism and digital capitalism is forcing worldwide attention to the starker divide between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” challenging how we think about the social contract. With fierce clarity and conviction, Renovating Democracy tears down our basic structures and challenges us to conceive of an alternative framework for governance. To truly renovate our global systems, the authors argue for empowering participation without populism by integrating social networks and direct democracy into the system with new mediating institutions that complement representative government. They outline steps to reconfigure the social contract to protect workers instead of jobs, shifting from a “redistribution” after wealth to “pre-distribution” with the aim to enhance the skills and assets of those less well-off. Lastly, they argue for harnessing globalization through “positive nationalism” at home while advocating for global cooperation—specifically with a partnership with China—to create a viable rules-based world order. Thought provoking and persuasive, Renovating Democracy serves as a point of departure that deepens and expands the discourse for positive change in governance.
To the ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in public and debating laws set by a randomly selected assembly of several hundred citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings, democracy meant meeting every summer in a field to discuss issues until consensus was reached. Our contemporary representative democracies are very different. Modern parliaments are gated and guarded, and it seems as if only certain people are welcome. Diagnosing what is wrong with representative government and aiming to recover some of the openness of ancient democracies, Open Democracy presents a new paradigm of democracy. Supporting a fresh nonelectoral understanding of democratic representation, Hélène Landemore demonstrates that placing ordinary citizens, rather than elites, at the heart of democratic power is not only the true meaning of a government of, by, and for the people, but also feasible and, more than ever, urgently needed. -- Cover page 4.
We are now becoming numbed by the outrageous events taking place within the political arena of our country. Throughout our nation, the division between factions continues to hold firm. The issue of how movement toward reconciliation can occur has become ever more pressing. Nothing short of our democracy is at stake. This book looks to the writings of the nineteenth-century Danish religious philosopher Søren Kierkegaard as a resource for thinking in fresh ways about how the divine power of creative transformation is at work in the world. Through divinity’s empowering of our practices in relating to others, democracy can be resurrected to a new, healthy life. Six important themes from Kierkegaard’s thought are used to do a comparative examination of Donald Trump together with his world and Kierkegaard and his world. The story of this standoff—between one of the world’s most famous and well-publicized figures and one of the world’s greatest thinkers—constitutes a compelling investigation and presents quite a contrast. Uncovered in the storytelling process of Kierkegaard trumping Trump are the “Sweet 16”: sixteen ways in which resurrection can be practiced in people’s lives and help to restore our democracy to a fuller and more vibrant version of itself.
“This global affairs veteran has carved out a solid, mature path, including for ‘flawed democracies’ like the U.S. We’d all be wise to follow.” — Vancouver Sun From the author of the Globe and Mail bestseller, Claws of the Panda, comes a book quite literally for our times. Restoring Democracy in an Age of Populists and Pestilence is a thoughtful account of how we can save democracies from the despots and populists who provide easy answers to complicated situations, dumbing political discourse down to sandbox antics. Manthorpe argues that democracy is more resilient than it appears, and is capable of overcoming the attacks from within and without that have sapped its vigour since the end of the Cold War. He begins with a description of the events of 1989, one of the seminal years in modern history. This saw the end of the Cold War, and the apparent conclusive victory of democracy and its civic values. But the view of these changes as a triumph of democracy — as summed up in Francis Fukuyama’s essay "The End of History" — was short-lived. Russia, shorn of its Soviet empire, and the Chinese Communist Party, re-examining its survival after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, began devising ways to counter-attack the West’s triumphalism and these met with considerable success. Internal pressures and contradictions — wealth disparity being chief among them — threaten the survival of many democratic systems. Abandoned industrial workers turn to the repeated platitudes designed to appeal to those left behind without actually offering them the ways and means to catch up. Immigrants, refugees, and the reformist fixations of isolated liberal elites have provided ammunition for would-be despots. Adding to the pressures building on the political norms of our democracies, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought economic and social stand-still for which no country is prepared.
As democracy is disrupted by globalization, the solution is to globalize democracy. This book explores the causes of the current crisis of democracy and advocates new ways for more representative, effective, and accountable governance in an interdependent world. Part 1 analyzes the split of the middle class and the subsequent political polarization which underlies people’s dissatisfaction with the way democracy works in developed countries. It also addresses the role of political emotions, including disappointments about unmet expectations, anger incited from opposition candidates, fear induced from government, and hope wrapping up new proposals for reform and change. In Part 2, the authors argue that a more effective governance would require reallocations of power at local, national, continental and global levels with innovative combinations of direct democracy, representative government, and rule by experts. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, comparative politics, international relations, political economy and democratic theory, as well as general readers interested in politics and current events.
In Post-Democracy (Polity, 2004) Colin Crouch argued that behind the façade of strong institutions, democracy in many advanced societies was being hollowed out, its big events becoming empty rituals as power passed increasingly to circles of wealthy business elites and an ever-more isolated political class. Crouch’s provocative argument has in many ways been vindicated by recent events, but these have also highlighted some weaknesses of the original thesis and shown that the situation today is even worse. The global financial deregulation that was the jewel in the crown of wealthy elite lobbying brought us the financial crisis and helped stimulate xenophobic movements which no longer accept the priority of institutions that safeguard democracy, like the rule of law. The rise of social media has enabled a handful of very rich individuals and institutions to target vast numbers of messages at citizens, giving a false impression of debate that is really stage-managed from a small number of concealed sources. Crouch evaluates the implications of these and other developments for his original thesis, arguing that while much of his thesis remains sound, he had under-estimated the value of institutions which are vital to the support of a democratic order. He also confronts the challenge of populists who seem to echo the complaints of Post-Democracy but whose pessimistic nostalgia brings an anti-democratic brew of hatred, exclusion and violence.
Schooling for Democracy in a Time of Global Crisis combines democratic theory with education practice to address the problem of a schooling that is for democracy, and points to the possibilities, limits and tensions of attempting to re-imagine education in more inclusive, collective and sustainable ways through democratic action. Contemporary liberal–democratic societies are faced with multiple complex global crises, which demand a range of responses, including how education can produce critical and engaged young people with a collective commitment to tackling the effects of the global climate crisis, growing social and economic inequalities, political instability, insecurity, fear and hate. This book examines how more critically democratic educational policies and practices, and the daily actions of learners, educators, leaders, communities and societies can work towards collective well-being, increased civic participation and commitment to an ecologically sustainable engagement with the planet. In addition to being a work of critical scholarly analysis, this book provides a manifesto for the possibilities of contemporary democratic education in a time of global crisis. This book will be of great interest to researchers, postgraduate students and policymakers in education.
This book is explicitly modernist at a time when many scholars have either forgotten the emancipatory promise of the Enlightenment or railed against it in the name of postmodernism. The book, broadly, adopts a hybrid epistemology that utilises the critical insights of Geisteswissenschaften Tradition (Weberian ‘Ideal-Type Analysis’) and the Habermas (1988) notions of the ‘public sphere’ and deliberative/dialogic democracy (‘ideal speech’) to advance a general proposition of democratic renewal by way of cyberdemocracy. Curiously, as democracy spreads across the world in the age of globalisation, it has also been accompanied by increased discontent with democratic systems. To that end, this book is not overly concerned with saving democracy beyond the liberal representative model, rather the focus is on how modern representative democracy has failed and how cyberdemocracy might function as a more effective model that truly represents the people by broadening participation and reflexive deliberation.
The European Union is facing today the greatest crisis since its creation. Brexit could mean not only the reversal of its steady enlargement—from 6 to 28 member states—but also the beginning of an inexorable decline leading to its disintegration. However, few today seem to recollect that it was precisely the British who were the first to promulgate the political culture which inspired the European Union’s construction—democracy and federalism—and the first who tried to realise, in June 1940, a European federation on the basis of an Anglo-French union. This volume traces the fundamental stages of the European unification process, placing it in relation to the wider process of world economic and political integration. In particular, it analyses the historical significance of the European Revolution, which is identified in the overcoming of the nation state—namely the modern political formula which institutionalised the political division of mankind—and the birth of the first truly international state. The universal historical significance of the European Revolution lies in its exportability—as for the other great European revolutions—and, therefore, its potential as progressively extensible to all the states of the planet. Europe was indeed the first region of the world where the barriers between national states fell, and a post-national political identity emerged, complementary to national political identities. It is, in fact, in the context of the European Union that democracy beyond the borders of the nation state has first been realized, constituting a guiding principle for global governance.