Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Classes And Elites In Democracy And Democratization
Download Classes And Elites In Democracy And Democratization full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Classes And Elites In Democracy And Democratization ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Classes and Elites in Democracy and Democratization by : Eva Etzioni Halevy
Download or read book Classes and Elites in Democracy and Democratization written by Eva Etzioni Halevy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of readings has been complied on the assumption that for an adequate explanation of the success and failure, the strengths and weaknesses, of democracy, it is necessary to resort to both class and elite theories and to strive for the future development of the extant beginnings of a synthesis between them. For this purpose, it presents the most central and intellectually outstanding readings that illustrate the manner in which the two theories have analyzed democracy, as well as democratization, in various parts of the world.
Book Synopsis Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy by : Michael Albertus
Download or read book Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy written by Michael Albertus and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that - in terms of institutional design, the allocation of power and privilege, and the lived experiences of citizens - democracy often does not restart the political game after displacing authoritarianism. Democratic institutions are frequently designed by the outgoing authoritarian regime to shield incumbent elites from the rule of law and give them an unfair advantage over politics and the economy after democratization. Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy systematically documents and analyzes the constitutional tools that outgoing authoritarian elites use to accomplish these ends, such as electoral system design, legislative appointments, federalism, legal immunities, constitutional tribunal design, and supermajority thresholds for change. The study provides wide-ranging evidence for these claims using data that spans the globe and dates from 1800 to the present. Albertus and Menaldo also conduct detailed case studies of Chile and Sweden. In doing so, they explain why some democracies successfully overhaul their elite-biased constitutions for more egalitarian social contracts.
Book Synopsis Paths Toward Democracy by : Ruth Berins Collier
Download or read book Paths Toward Democracy written by Ruth Berins Collier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-13 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the experiences of Western Europe and South America, Professor Collier delineates a complex and varied set of patterns of democratization.
Book Synopsis Inequality and Democratization by : Ben W. Ansell
Download or read book Inequality and Democratization written by Ben W. Ansell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research on the economic origins of democracy and dictatorship has shifted away from the impact of growth and turned toward the question of how different patterns of growth - equal or unequal - shape regime change. This book offers a new theory of the historical relationship between economic modernization and the emergence of democracy on a global scale, focusing on the effects of land and income inequality. Contrary to most mainstream arguments, Ben W. Ansell and David J. Samuels suggest that democracy is more likely to emerge when rising, yet politically disenfranchised, groups demand more influence because they have more to lose, rather than when threats of redistribution to elite interests are low.
Book Synopsis Democracy and Democratization by : John D Nagle
Download or read book Democracy and Democratization written by John D Nagle and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1999-05-26 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging overview of the processes of democratization in post-Communist Europe, places the transitions in East-Central Europe within a broad European and global context. The authors begin with a introduction to the concept and theories of democracy and then examine the emerging politics of the new democracies to set the post-Communist transitions in longer-term comparative perspective with earlier and existing processes of democratization in Southern Europe, Latin America, and East and Southeast Asia. Finally the politics of EU accession are introduced to place the transitions within the wider context of European integration. Concluding with a summary of recent critiques of modern democracy and looking toward future theories, this text provides a comprehensive introduction to what will remain the key contemporary issue for all students of political science.
Book Synopsis The Third Wave by : Samuel P. Huntington
Download or read book The Third Wave written by Samuel P. Huntington and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1974 and 1990 more than thirty countries in southern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe shifted from authoritarian to democratic systems of government. This global democratic revolution is probably the most important political trend in the late twentieth century. In The Third Wave, Samuel P. Huntington analyzes the causes and nature of these democratic transitions, evaluates the prospects for stability of the new democracies, and explores the possibility of more countries becoming democratic. The recent transitions, he argues, are the third major wave of democratization in the modem world. Each of the two previous waves was followed by a reverse wave in which some countries shifted back to authoritarian government. Using concrete examples, empirical evidence, and insightful analysis, Huntington provides neither a theory nor a history of the third wave, but an explanation of why and how it occurred. Factors responsible for the democratic trend include the legitimacy dilemmas of authoritarian regimes; economic and social development; the changed role of the Catholic Church; the impact of the United States, the European Community, and the Soviet Union; and the "snowballing" phenomenon: change in one country stimulating change in others. Five key elite groups within and outside the nondemocratic regime played roles in shaping the various ways democratization occurred. Compromise was key to all democratizations, and elections and nonviolent tactics also were central. New democracies must deal with the "torturer problem" and the "praetorian problem" and attempt to develop democratic values and processes. Disillusionment with democracy, Huntington argues, is necessary to consolidating democracy. He concludes the book with an analysis of the political, economic, and cultural factors that will decide whether or not the third wave continues. Several "Guidelines for Democratizers" offer specific, practical suggestions for initiating and carrying out reform. Huntington's emphasis on practical application makes this book a valuable tool for anyone engaged in the democratization process. At this volatile time in history, Huntington's assessment of the processes of democratization is indispensable to understanding the future of democracy in the world.
Book Synopsis Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by : Daron Acemoglu
Download or read book Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy written by Daron Acemoglu and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy. Different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political power and resources. Thus democracy is preferred by the majority of citizens, but opposed by elites. Dictatorship nevertheless is not stable when citizens can threaten social disorder and revolution. In response, when the costs of repression are sufficiently high and promises of concessions are not credible, elites may be forced to create democracy. By democratizing, elites credibly transfer political power to the citizens, ensuring social stability. Democracy consolidates when elites do not have strong incentive to overthrow it. These processes depend on (1) the strength of civil society, (2) the structure of political institutions, (3) the nature of political and economic crises, (4) the level of economic inequality, (5) the structure of the economy, and (6) the form and extent of globalization.
Book Synopsis Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy by : John Higley
Download or read book Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy written by John Higley and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2006-07-27 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling and convincing study represents the culmination of the authors' several decades of research on the pivotal role played by elites in the success or failure of political regimes. Revising the classical theory of elites and politics, John Higley and Michael Burton distinguish basic types of elites and associated political regimes. They canvas political change during the modern historical and contemporary periods to identify circumstances and ways in which the sine qua non of liberal democracy, a consensually united elite, has formed and persisted. The book considers an impressive body of cases, examining how consensually united elites have fostered forty-five liberal democracies and how disunited or ideologically united elites have thus far prevented liberal democracy in more than one hundred other countries. The authors argue that obstacles to the emergence of elites propitious for liberal democracy are more formidable than democratization enthusiasts recognize. They assess prospects for the transformation of disunited and ideologically united elites where they now exist, ask whether current challenges to Western liberal democracies will undermine their consensually united elites, and explore what the rise of the distinctive elite clustered around George W. Bush may portend for America's liberal democracy. The authors' powerful and important argument reframes our thinking about liberal democracy and questions optimistic assumptions about the prospects for its spread in the twenty-first century.
Book Synopsis Dictators and Democrats by : Stephan Haggard
Download or read book Dictators and Democrats written by Stephan Haggard and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rigorous and comprehensive account of recent democratic transitions around the world From the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the spread of democracy across the developing and post-Communist worlds transformed the global political landscape. What drove these changes and what determined whether the emerging democracies would stabilize or revert to authoritarian rule? Dictators and Democrats takes a comprehensive look at the transitions to and from democracy in recent decades. Deploying both statistical and qualitative analysis, Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman engage with theories of democratic change and advocate approaches that emphasize political and institutional factors. While inequality has been a prominent explanation for democratic transitions, the authors argue that its role has been limited, and elites as well as masses can drive regime change. Examining seventy-eight cases of democratic transition and twenty-five reversions since 1980, Haggard and Kaufman show how differences in authoritarian regimes and organizational capabilities shape popular protest and elite initiatives in transitions to democracy, and how institutional weaknesses cause some democracies to fail. The determinants of democracy lie in the strength of existing institutions and the public's capacity to engage in collective action. There are multiple routes to democracy, but those growing out of mass mobilization may provide more checks on incumbents than those emerging from intra-elite bargains. Moving beyond well-known beliefs regarding regime changes, Dictators and Democrats explores the conditions under which transitions to democracy are likely to arise.
Book Synopsis The New Power Elite by : Alan Shipman
Download or read book The New Power Elite written by Alan Shipman and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2018-04-13 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elites have always ruled – wielding inordinate power and wealth, taking decisions that shape life for the rest. In good times the ‘1%’ can hide their privilege, or use growing social mobility and economic prosperity as a justification. When times get tougher there’s a backlash. So the first years of the twenty-first century – a time of financial crashes, oligarchy and corruption in the West; persistent poverty in the south; and rising inequality everywhere – have brought elites and ‘establishments’ under unprecedented fire. Yet those swept to power by this discontent are themselves a part of the elite, attacking from within and extending rather than ending its agenda. The New Power Elite shows how major political and social change is typically driven by renegade elite fractions, who co-opt or sideline elites’ traditional enemies. It is the first book to combine the politics, economics, sociology and history of elite rule to present a compact, comprehensive account of who’s at the top, and why we let them get there.
Book Synopsis Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy by : Daniel Ziblatt
Download or read book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy written by Daniel Ziblatt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do democracies form and what makes them die? Daniel Ziblatt revisits this timely and classic question in a wide-ranging historical narrative that traces the evolution of modern political democracy in Europe from its modest beginnings in 1830s Britain to Adolf Hitler's 1933 seizure of power in Weimar Germany. Based on rich historical and quantitative evidence, the book offers a major reinterpretation of European history and the question of how stable political democracy is achieved. The barriers to inclusive political rule, Ziblatt finds, were not inevitably overcome by unstoppable tides of socioeconomic change, a simple triumph of a growing middle class, or even by working class collective action. Instead, political democracy's fate surprisingly hinged on how conservative political parties - the historical defenders of power, wealth, and privilege - recast themselves and coped with the rise of their own radical right. With striking modern parallels, the book has vital implications for today's new and old democracies under siege.
Book Synopsis Where Did the Revolution Go? by : Donatella della Porta
Download or read book Where Did the Revolution Go? written by Donatella della Porta and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-28 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where Did the Revolution Go? considers the apparent disappearance of the large social movements that have contributed to democratization. Revived by recent events of the Arab Spring, this question is once again paramount. Is the disappearance real, given the focus of mass media and scholarship on electoral processes and 'normal politics'? Does it always happen, or only under certain circumstances? Are those who struggled for change destined to be disappointed by the slow pace of transformation? Which mechanisms are activated and deactivated during the rise and fall of democratization? This volume addresses these questions through empirical analysis based on quantitative and qualitative methods (including oral history) of cases in two waves of democratization: Central Eastern European cases in 1989 as well as cases in the Middle East and Mediterranean region in 2011.
Book Synopsis Democracy and Redistribution by : Carles Boix
Download or read book Democracy and Redistribution written by Carles Boix and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-21 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employing analytical tools borrowed from game theory, Carles Boix offers a complete theory of political transitions, in which political regimes ultimately hinge on the nature of economic assets, their distribution among individuals, and the balance of power among different social groups. Backed up by detailed historical work and extensive statistical analysis that goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, this book explains, among many other things, why democracy emerged in classical Athens. It also discusses the early triumph of democracy in both nineteenth-century agrarian Norway, Switzerland and northeastern America and the failure in countries with a powerful landowning class.
Book Synopsis Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities by : Amory Gethin
Download or read book Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities written by Amory Gethin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since WWII. Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a treasure trove of information on the dynamics of polarization in modern democracies. The chapters draw on a unique set of surveys conducted between 1948 and 2020 in fifty countries on five continents, analyzing the links between votersÕ political preferences and socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, education, wealth, occupation, religion, ethnicity, age, and gender. This analysis sheds new light on how political movements succeed in coalescing multiple interests and identities in contemporary democracies. It also helps us understand the conditions under which conflicts over inequality become politically salient, as well as the similarities and constraints of voters supporting ethnonationalist politicians like Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump. Bringing together cutting-edge data and historical analysis, editors Amory Gethin, Clara Martnez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty offer a vital resource for understanding the voting patterns of the present and the likely sources of future political conflict.
Book Synopsis Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe by : John Higley
Download or read book Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe written by John Higley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished group of scholars examine recent transitions to democracy and the prospects for democratic stability in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Portugal, Spain and Uruguay. They also assess the role of elites in the longer-established democratic regimes in Columbia, Costa Rica, Italy, Mexico and Venezuela. The authors conclude that in independent states with long records of political instability and authoritarian rule, democratic consolidation requires the achievement of elite 'consensual unity' - that is, agreement among all politically important elites on the worth of existing democratic institutions and respect for democratic rules-of-the-game, coupled with increased 'structural integration' among those elites. Two processes by which consensual unity can be established are explored - elite settlement, the negotiating of compromises on basic disagreements, and elite convergence, a more subtle series of tactical decisions by rival elites which have cumulative effect, over perhaps a generation.
Book Synopsis The Light that Failed by : Ivan Krastev
Download or read book The Light that Failed written by Ivan Krastev and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark book that completely transforms our understanding of the crisis of liberalism, from two pre-eminent intellectuals Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only there but also back in the heartland of the West. In this brilliant work of political psychology, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of history turned out to be only the beginning of an Age of Imitation. Reckoning with the history of the last thirty years, they show that the most powerful force behind the wave of populist xenophobia that began in Eastern Europe stems from resentment at the post-1989 imperative to become Westernized. Through this prism, the Trump revolution represents an ironic fulfillment of the promise that the nations exiting from communist rule would come to resemble the United States. In a strange twist, Trump has elevated Putin's Russia and Orbán's Hungary into models for the United States. Written by two pre-eminent intellectuals bridging the East/West divide, The Light that Failed is a landmark book that sheds light on the extraordinary history of our Age of Imitation.
Book Synopsis Competitive Authoritarianism by : Steven Levitsky
Download or read book Competitive Authoritarianism written by Steven Levitsky and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-16 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized.
