Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 73 - June 2020): Democracy

This book examines the development of democratic thought in the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, with a focus on the movement's ideas about participatory democracy. It makes particular reference to two key periods: the 1980s 'people's power' movement and the subsequent years of policy formulation from 1990 when the ANC began to design and implement a system of participatory democracy alongside a representative government. Through the examination of historic documents and in-depth interviews with former ANC activists, government officials and those involved in policy development, the author explores the inspiration for the party's commitment to establishing participatory democracy. The book combines democratic theory and political and intellectual history to look at the role of popular participation as part of a broader trajectory of the ANC's democratic thought. It critically engages with concepts used in the party's participatory discourse with a view to deepening our understanding of how ideas have shaped the construction of South Africa's democracy.

This edited volume provides a comprehensive overview of the renewal of academic engagement in the Argentinian dictatorship in the context of the post-2001 crisis. Significant social and judicial changes and the opening of archives have led to major revisions of the research dedicated to this period. As such, the contributors offer a unique presentation to an English-speaking audience, mapping and critiquing these developments and widening the recent debates in Argentina about the legacy of the dictatorship in this long-term perspective.

This book examines how opposition groups respond to the dilemma posed by authoritarian elections in the Arab World, with specific focus on Jordan and Algeria. While scholars have investigated critical questions such as why authoritarian rulers would hold elections and whether such elections lead to further political liberalization, there has been comparatively little work on the strategies adopted by opposition groups during authoritarian elections. Nevertheless, we know their strategic choices can have important implications for the legitimacy of the electoral process, reform, democratization, and post-election conflicts. This project fills in an important gap in our understanding of opposition politics under authoritarianism by offering an explanation for the range of strategies adopted by opposition groups in the face of contentious elections in the Arab World.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was assumed that liberal democracies would flourish worldwide. Instead, today authoritarian leaders are gaining power - from Trump's US and Bolsonaro's Brazil to Orban's Hungary - while Russia and China have turned back towards their old, autocratic traditions. This book examines the origins and implications of this shift, and focusses especially on the longstanding coercion of poor people. As industrial employment, and now also many service jobs, are being replaced through technological innovations, state-subsidised, low-paid, insecure work is being enforced through regimes of benefits cuts and sanctions. Authoritarians are exploiting the divisions in the working class that this creates to stoke resentment against immigrants and poor people. The author identifies new social movements and policies (notably the Universal Basic Income) which could counter these dangers.

The critical theory of the Frankfurt School has undergone numerous and at times fundamental changes over the last ninety years. Since the late 1960s, it has been characterized primarily by Jürgen Habermas's "communicative turn" and a focus on normative foundations. Today, that "second generation" exists side-by-side with a "third generation" represented most prominently by Axel Honneth's turn toward recognition, ethical life, and the normative reconstruction of social institutions. This volume brings together critical voices on the state and direction of Frankfurt School theory today by examining Honneth's theory in light of both current challenges and the intellectual and political ambitions that have shaped the tradition from its beginning. United in their strong commitment to critical scholarship, the authors collected here approach Honneth's work from different backgrounds, employ a wide variety of methodologies, and write in different genres, ranging from the sober scholarly analysis to programmatic and political appeals. The collective aim of these reflections is not to reject Honneth's theory but to build upon his work and incorporate his themes of recognition and social freedom into a new project of critical theory that can prove adequate to the political and social crises of our time.

This book's leading goal is to explain why some states in the Americas have been markedly more effective than others at forming stable democratic regimes. The six states analyzed are the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. The study identifies the critical challenges each state encountered at different stages of its state-creation and regime- formation processes, from the colonial period to the present. In its concluding chapter, the study presents a series of time-related hypotheses designed to capture the different evolutionary processes and explain variances in success. 

This book discusses the causes and nature of political differentiation in Europe. It deals with the normative problem of differentiated integration, both in its vertical and horizontal dimensions, and addresses the problem of differentiation through a theory of democratic autonomy and dominance.  A politically differentiated EU could deprive people of their right to co-determine common affairs and have adverse effects for democratic self-rule. It could also take away the people's ability to influence political decisions that they are ultimately affected by. This book argues that differentiation is not an innocent instrument for handling conflicts in interconnected contexts. The consequences of what might be a benign plea for sovereignty and independence can in fact lead to the opposite.

This book examines the relationship between corruption scandals and transitional processes in post-Milosević Serbia after 2000. The study challenges the view that corruption has always been understood as a conflict between private interests and the public good, as these concepts are defined in Western democracies, and explores how anti-corruption discourse has been used for political mobilisation. Through an examination of high-profile political scandals in Serbia, the author shows how the meaning of corruption changed over time. In the early 2000s, corruption focused on the legacy of Milosević's rule and was identified through the public's limited access to the privatisation process. By the end of the decade, conceptualisations of corruption in public debate were so diversified that each anti-corruption measure undertaken by the state was interpreted as an act of corruption by other voices in the discourse. The book will appeal to students and scholars interested in corruption studies, discourse analysis and Balkan politics. 

This book studies the emergence of the regulatory state in Europe and its impact on democratic governance in Scandinavia. On the basis of comparative studies on various government structures in Scandinavia and the EU, the author analyses the repercussions of the change from government to dominant non-parliamentary democratic governance. In addition, readers will be introduced to the organizational and institutional changes and developments caused by economic and welfare state reforms. A cutting-edge resource, the book will appeal to students and scholars of political science and political economics, while also offering an engaging read for civil servants and policymakers. 

This Pivot explores the mechanism of election manipulation in ostensibly democratic but essentially authoritarian systems called the hybrid regime, using the 2018 parliamentary elections in Bangladesh as an example. The 2018 election has delivered an unprecedented victory to the incumbent Bangladesh Awami League. Elections pose serious dilemmas for the leaders of hybrid regimes. While contested elections bolster their claims of democracy and augment their legitimacy, they can also threaten the status quo. Faced with the challenge, the incumbents tend to hold stage-managed elections. This book offers incisive examination of Bangladesh's political environment, rigorous scrutiny of the roles of state institutions including the law enforcing agencies, and meticulous analysis of election results. It also fills in a gap in the extant hybrid regime literature which seldom explores the strategies of engineered elections.                                      

This book presents an in-depth analysis of the role played by the EU accession process in Turkey's democratic evolution and in the empowerment of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the early 2000s. Often moving against the grain of consolidated analytical positions, the author finds that the accession process can have a critical impact on the political evolution and institutional setting of an aspiring member state that goes well beyond the simple Europeanization process (or EU accession conditionality). In the case of Turkey, that process created the essential conditions and environment for the country's political modernization by helping the emergence of a "periphery" (including Kurds, "conservative" Muslims and non-Muslims) that secularism had pushed into a marginal, secondary status in Turkish society. Turkey's gradual evolution in an authoritarian direction, following the stalling of the EU accession process, offers further proof of the decisive role that the EU accession can play in a country's democratic advancement. The book additionally indicates how Turkey's EU-driven democratic evolution for a number of years had important implications in terms of regional and global order.

Over time, globalization has evolved into a shared journey of humanity, involving entrepreneurship, innovation, business and policy advances around the world. This book explores the link between globalization and development, and reveals the dynamics, strengths and weaknesses, trends in and implications of globalization in Asia and Africa. Presenting papers by respected experts in the field, it shares essential insights into the status quo of globalization processes and structures, identifies the opportunities and threats that globalization faces, and sheds light on the path to global peace. Topics range from using fair-trade practices to compensate for the impacts of globalization; to lessons learned for tomorrow from Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan; as well as emergent topics such as global entrepreneurship capacity and developing the Chinese economy overseas.

The EU as a democratic polity has been invented: it is a product of creative and innovative actors and thinkers that conceptualized and by and by helped to realise it, from the beginning up to the present. But the concepts, ideas, and utopias of a democratic Europe differ considerably. The processes of inventing and building a democratic EU are marked by conceptual controversies in both public and academic debates. These are the resource for the present book, which focuses on the concepts, actors and controversies related to inventing the EU as a democratic polity. The chapters study exemplary long-term and detail cases related to inventing and institutionalizing the decisive elements of representative democracy in the EU--a parliament, citizens that vote for it in universal suffrage and governmental bodies that are linked to parliament in much the same way as government is in a parliamentary democracy.

This book analyzes the reform movement in Iran and traces its political roots from the beginning of the 20th century to its relative demise with the purging of the Green Movement after the 2009 disputed elections. The author explains how this movement was shaped in a country with an authoritarian Islamist regime, how it grew, and what its achievements are, including its failures and setbacks. The project will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of Middle Eastern politics and sociology, Iranian politics, democracy, and the US-Iran relations.

This edited volume addresses the issues of Iraqi Kurdistan's political economy with historically grounded, theoretically informed, and conceptually relevant scholarship that prioritizes comparative politics over international relations. The book seeks to explore the dynamics of Iraqi Kurdistan at the stage of referendum for independence from a political economy perspective within its own debates, conflicts, and interests. Overall, the authors contribute to these debates by exploring key questions in novel ways, focusing on comparative methodology that serve to expand the scope of scientific inquiry and place it into more solid understanding. 

This book analyses the conflicts that emerged from the Brazilian labour movement's active participation in a rapidly changing political environment, particularly in the context of the coming to power of a party with strong roots in the labour movement. While the close relations with the Workers' Party (PT) have shaped the labour movement's political agenda, its trajectory cannot be understood solely with reference to that party's electoral fortunes. Through a study of the political trajectory of the Brazilian labour movement over the last three decades, the author explores the conditions under which the labour movement has developed militant and moderate strategies.

This book explores in detail new protest organisation and mobilisation strategies of young activists in the digital age with the aim to identify the tactics that worked well against those creating high risks in the context of digitally supported protests. Focusing on Egyptian protests as well as peaceful protests in Syria, the book offers rich and unique data as it brings together the experiences and voices of the key figures involved in the protests, both on the ground and online. It challenges perspectives that defined the Arab uprisings as leaderless movements formed through the non-hierarchical communication of digital technologies. The author presents three kinds of leaders that shape the political communication environment in digitally supported protests and highlights the significance of their leadership skills to the movements' capacities.

This book rethinks resistance against neoliberalism in the context of the crisis of Western liberal democracy and the rise of new radical left parties in Europe. Drawing upon a wide range of methodological approaches in contemporary political and social theory, it explores how the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis represents the opening of possibilities for resistance and examines the structural hurdles facing radical politics in effectively challenging neoliberalism. The author challenges the dominant conceptions of democratic politics by critically interrogating the role of liberalism in the depoliticisation of governing and the neoliberal restructuring of the democratic role of the state. The trajectory of new radical left parties in Slovenia, Greece and Spain is used to demonstrate the need to overcome the binary divide between institutional politics and resistance in radical political theory and practice.

This open access book discusses the relationship between periodicals, tourism, and nation-building in Mexico. It enquires into how magazines, a staple form of the promotional apparatus of tourism since its inception, articulated an imaginative geography of Mexico at a time when that industry became a critical means of economic recovery and political stability after the Revolution. Notwithstanding their vogue, popularity, reach, and close affiliations to commerce and state over several decades, magazines have not received any sustained critical attention in the scholarship on that period. This book aims to redress that oversight. It argues that illustrated magazines like Mexican Folkways (1925-1937) and Mexico This Month (1955-1971) offer rich and compelling materials in that regard, not only as unique tools for interrogating the ramifications of tourism on the country's reconstruction, but as autonomous objects of study that form a vital if complex part of Mexico's visual culture.

This timely book presents a critique of binary majority rule and provides insights into why, in many instances, the outcome of a two-option ballot does not accurately reflect the will of the people. Based on the author's first-hand experience, majority-voting is argued to be a catalyst of populism and its divisive outcomes have prompted countless disputes throughout Europe and Asia. In like manner, simple majority rule is seen as a cause of conflict in war zones, and of dysfunction in so-called stable democracies. In order to safeguard democracy, an all-party power-sharing approach is proposed, which would make populism less attractive to voters and governments alike. In geographically arranged chapters, well-tested alternative voting procedures (e. g. non-majoritarian Modified Borda Count) are presented in case studies of Northern Ireland, Central Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Russia, China, North Korea and Mongolia.  

This book strives to answer two interrelated questions: Why have certain states in the Americas been more successful than others at creating stable democratic regimes? Why have certain states in the Americas failed to create stable democratic regimes? To answer both questions, the author focuses on four states - the United States, Argentina, Chile, and Peru.  Throughout the analysis, he isolates and evaluates the conditions that helped or hindered the development of each state and of its political regime.  He presents his conclusions in the form of time-related explanatory hypotheses. By identifying and examining the conditions that brought about the transformation of each states and of its political regimes, this study ultimately facilitates a discussion of the future of democracy in each of these countries as well as in the world.

This edited volume investigates America's  transforming democracy as it faces the challenges and developments of the 21st century--challenges and developments that have brought deep dissatisfaction, cultural fragmentation, and economic indignation. Although political power remains in the hands of the people, a fundamental incapability to compromise has locked policymakers in a permanent stalemate. In this legislative paralysis, grassroots movements build more and more momentum amidst regular protests and civil disobedience. This new political vigor and dynamism is dualistic, portending either a future of falsehoods and authoritarianism or a more empowering and direct form of democracy. This book ultimately seeks to understand how the US government is frantically adjusting to these sharp cultural, technological, and economic changes.

This book examines the role of the legislature in the democratic governance of Nigeria. Once one of the foremost political institutions of governance established in the early days of Colonial administration in Nigeria, the legislature has had an inconsistent role since statehood, subject to repeat dissolution at the hands of various military regimes.  Focusing on the Nigerian Fourth Republic's National Assembly (1999-present), this book discusses in detail the ways in which the national assembly has handled each of its major functions, the nature of the relationship between the assembly and the legislature, and the institutional mechanism through which its internal business is facilitated and executed. Furthermore, the chapters examine the level of assertiveness of the legislature, and the degree of importance and weight attached to their contributions to governance in motions, resolutions, and law-making. This book offers a unique look into legislative studies, an area which has been historically overlooked in the research on the Nigerian government, and will be useful to students and researchers in African studies, democracy and state-building and legislative studies.

This Palgrave Handbook provides a definitive account of women's political rights across all major regions of the world, focusing both on women's right to vote and women's right to run for political office. This dual focus makes this the first book to combine historical overviews of debates about enfranchising women alongside analyses of more contemporary efforts to increase women's political representation around the globe. Chapter authors map and assess the impact of these groundbreaking reforms, providing insight into these dynamics in a wide array of countries where women's suffrage and representation have taken different paths and led to varying degrees of transformation. On the eve of many countries celebrating a century of women's suffrage, as well as record numbers of women elected and appointed to political office, this timely volume offers an important introduction to ongoing developments related to women's political empowerment worldwide. It will be of interest to students and scholars across the fields of gender and politics, women's studies, history and sociology. 

The parliamentary style of politics has been formed over centuries; nobody theorised it in advance. This book presents a thought experiment to spell out key principles of the parliamentary ideal type of politics. Max Weber offers the main intellectual inspiration, Westminster parliament provides the main historical reference and the author's studies on parliamentary procedure and rhetoric provide the background for the book. Parliamentary acting and thinking offer us the best example of politics as a contingent and controversial activity. Using a parliamentary imagination, the author constructs the ideal type in five main chapters: dissensual modes of proceeding; rhetoric of parliamentary debate; parliamentary formation and control of government; parliamentarians as politicians; and parliamentary time as their common subtext. In the last two chapters, the book outlines the possibilities of extending parliamentary judgment to politics beyond parliaments proper and the chances for parliamentary politics succeeding today.

​This book analyzes several components of democratization and party competition in West Africa focusing on Senegal - a country with one of the longest histories of multiparty elections. It does so in service of examining the origins and consequences of the proliferation of political parties, a trend that has taken hold in Senegal and a variety of other African countries. The author uses novel sources of data to illuminate the economic and political roots of party functions and trajectories by placing party formation, opposition, ruling party loyalty, and presidential turnover into local and regional contexts. This work will appeal to African Studies scholars, professors, graduate students, and policy makers.

This book analyzes privatization reforms, property rights, and raiders in post-Soviet Russia. The author surveys the existing literature in the context of predatory raiding in Russia and introduces the notion and concept of this phenomena; he suggests that the study may serve as an explanatory model for corporate, property, and land raiding in Russia. Building on previous scholarship, this monograph conceptualizes the predatory character of corporate hostile takeovers in Russia and links it with the coercive nature of the ruling authoritarian regime. This project will appeal to scholars, graduate students, and researchers in Russian and Post-Soviet politics, capitalism, corruption, and property rights.

This book explores why democratization processes in Sub-Saharan Africa have made so little progress despite more than two decades of multi-party politics on the subcontinent. By applying multiple linear regression analyses to a new data set on multi-party elections in Sub-Saharan Africa, the study investigates the relationship between political mobilizations and electoral competitiveness. It finds that the more societal groups engage in political mobilizations, such as protests and strikes, the more competitive elections become. Based on these results, the author argues for a change in the policies of international democracy assistance programs. The study's findings suggest that efforts to promote democracy would likely be more successful if international donors focused their support on organizations that have active constituencies and are willing to use their mobilization capacity to address ruling elites with political or socio-economic grievances.

This book explores how national identity has been negotiated and (re)imagined through the political symbols that embody it in post-conflict Timor-Leste. It develops a Modernist approach to nations and nationalism by incorporating Bourdieusian theories of symbolic capital and conflict, to examine how national identity has been constructed and represented in political symbols. Taking case studies of flags, monuments, national heroes, and street art, it critically analyses how a diverse population has interpreted and (re)constructed its national identity throughout the first decade of independence, and how the transition from a context of conflict to peace has influenced such popular imaginings. By examining these processes of identification with a wide range of symbols, the book discusses the numerous challenges that this young nation-state still faces, including victimhood and recognition, democratization and electoral politics, the political role of cosmology and spirituality, and post-colonial generational differences and divisions.

Deliberative democracy is an embattled political project. It is accused of political naiveté for it only talks about power without taking power. Others, meanwhile, take issue with deliberative democracy's dominance in the field of democratic theory and practice. An industry of consultants, facilitators, and experts of deliberative forums has grown over the past decades, suggesting that the field has benefited from a broken political system. This book is inspired by these accusations. It argues that deliberative democracy's tense relationship with power is not a pathology but constitutive of deliberative practice. Deliberative democracy gains relevance when it navigates complex relations of power in modern societies, learns from its mistakes, remains epistemically humble but not politically meek.  These arguments are situated in three facets of deliberative democracy--norms, forums, and systems--and concludes by applying these ideas to three of the most pressing issues in contemporary times--post-truth politics, populism, and illiberalism.

This book examines the waves of protest that broke out in the 2010s as the collective actions of self-organized publics. Drawing on theories of publics/counter-publics and developing an analytical framework that allows the comparison of different country cases, this volume explores the transformation from spontaneous demonstrations, driven by civic outrage against injustice to more institutionalized forms of protest. Presenting comparative research and case studies on e.g. the Portuguese Generation in Trouble, the Arab Spring in Northern Africa, or Occupy Wall Street in the USA, the authors explore how protest publics emerge and evolve in very different ways - from creating many small citizen groups focused on particular projects to more articulated political agendas for both state and society. These protest publics have provoked and legitimized concrete socio-political changes, altering the balance of power in specific political spaces, and in some cases generating profound moments of instability that can lead both to revolutions and to peaceful transformations of political institutions. The authors argue that this recent wave of protests is driven by a new type of social actor: self-organized publics. In some cases these protest publics can lead to democratic reform and redistributive policies, while in others they can produce destabilization, ethnic and nationalist populism, and authoritarianism. This book will help readers to better understand how seemingly spontaneous public events and protests evolve into meaningful, well-structured collective action and come to shape political processes in diverse regions of the globe.

This edited collection explores the ways in which the 2008/2009 social and economic crisis in Southern Europe affected the interpretation of the transitional past in Spain, Greece and Portugal. Discussing topics such as public memory, Europeanism and uses of the past by grassroots movements, the volume showcases how the crisis challenged consolidated perceptions of the transitions as 'success stories'. It revisits the dominant historical narratives around Southern European transitions to democracy more than forty years since the demise of authoritarian regimes, bringing together contributors from history, cultural studies, political science and sociology.

This book explores the stagnation of democracy in the Western Balkans over the last decade. The author maps regional features of rising authoritarianism that mirror larger global trends and, in doing so, outlines the core mechanisms of authoritarian rule in the Balkans, with a particular focus on Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. These mechanisms include the creation of constant crises, the use of external powers to balance outside influences, as well as state capture. The authoritarian patterns exist alongside formal democratic institutions, resulting in competitive authoritarian regimes that use social polarization to retain power. As the countries of the Western Balkans aspire, at least formally, to join the European Union, authoritarianism is often informal.

This book is framed by four over-arching narratives of inquiry. While all four are firmly anchored in Australia's political milieu - and as such are of considerable interest to a range of actors therein (scholars and students, the media, the political class) - they will also be of interest to a global audience.  First, ideation. More specifically, what is the nature of populist politics in Australia, why does it consistently resonate with particular electoral demographics, what is the basis of its appeal over and above electoral cycles, and how should we position it in relation to more familiar concepts such as democracy, nationalism and progressive-conservative politics?  Second, election. Despite the disparaging tone that the mainstream media can sometimes adopt when discussing electoral outcomes for right-populism and Hanson in particular, why does right-populism consistently resonate with particular electoral demographics, characterized by various criteria - geographic, social class, gender? How does populism play out in electoral cycles, and how do mainstream political parties capitalize on it for political gain?      Third, policy and politics. Much to the disappointment of many, right-populism in Australia generally and PHONP in particular has been influential in policy formulation across a range of domains. These include Indigenous policy and reconciliation, immigration and international relations, industry policy, and the politics of gender. Taking a broader perspective, how does the resurgence of right-populism in Australia today differ from two decades ago, and is the polity, generally speaking, shifting to the right?  Fourth, Australia's right-populism from a comparative international perspective. More specifically, what are the similarities and differences between right-populism in Australia on the one hand and in Europe and the US on the other, and are we justified in concluding, however tentatively, that the rise of right-populism is similar across these polities? 

This book presents a new democratic theory of election reform, using the tradition of political realism to interrogate and synthesize findings from global elections research and voting theory. In a world of democratic deficits and uncivil societies, political researchers and reformers should prioritize creating smarter ballots before smarter voters. Many democracies' electoral systems impose a dilemma of disempowerment which traps voters between the twin dangers of vote-splitting and "lesser evil" choices, restricting individual expression while degrading systemic accountability. The application of innovative conceptual tools to comparative empirical analysis and previous experimental results reveals that ballot structure is crucial, but often overlooked, in sustaining this dilemma. Multi-mark ballot structures can resolve the dilemma of disempowerment by allowing voters to rank or grade multiple parties or candidates per contest, thereby furnishing democratic citizens with a broader array of options, finer tools of expression, and stronger powers of accountability. Innovative proposals for ranking and grading ballots in both multi-winner and single-winner contests, including referendums, are offered to provoke further experimentation and reform--a process that may help the cause of democratic elections' relevance and survival.

This book examines the connection between two major developments in the world: state-formation and democratization. Since 1946, the number of states has increased from 66 to almost 200 independent states, but our knowledge of these state-formation processes is limited. The authors present a new database on state-formation and democratization, which enables novel classifications and analyses of these processes on the global level. They argue that the form of state-formation affects the probability for democratization in new states and that the initial regime that state-formation establishes at the time of independence has long-term effects on new states' democratization. 

Liberal democracy today, having aligned itself with capitalism, is producing a generalized feeling of weariness and disillusionment with government among the citizenry of many countries.  Because of a decades-long march of globalized capitalism, economic oligarchies have gained oppressive levels of political power, and as a result, the economic needs of many people around the world have been neglected. It then becomes essential to remember that our ability to change society emerges from our power to formulate different questions; or, in this case, alternative understandings of democracy. This book draws together a variety of alternative theories of democracies in a quest to expose readers to a selection of the most exciting and innovative new approaches to politics today. The consideration of these leading alternative conceptualizations of democracy is important, as it is now common to see xenophobic and racist rhetoric using the platform of liberal democracy to threaten ideas of plurality, diversity, equality, and economic justice. In looking at four different models of democracy (utopian democracy, radical democracy, republican democracy, and plural democracy) this book argues that encounters with alternate conceptualizations of democracy is necessary if citizens and scholars are going to understand the constellation of possibilities that exist for inclusive, plural, economically equal, and just societies.