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Phantom Democracy
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Download or read book Phantom Democracy written by C. Boggs and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a powerful new book, Boggs traces the historical evolution of American politics by focusing on the gradual triumph of corporate and military power over democratic institutions and practices. The consequences of expanding United States global presence since World War II - involving an integrated and interwoven system of power based in the permanent war economy, national security-state, and corporate interests - has meant erosion of democratic politics, strengthening of the imperial presidency, increased corporate and military influence over elections and legislation, weakening of popular governance, and diminution of citizenship. The events of 9/11 and their aftermath, including the War on Terror, two lengthy wars and foreign occupations, new threats of war, and massive increases in Pentagon spending, have only deepened the trend toward ever-more concentrated forms of power in a society that ostensibly embraces democratic values. Such developments, Boggs argues, have deep origins in American history going back to the founding documents, ideological precepts of the Constitution, early oligarchic rule, slavery, the Indian wars, and westward colonial expansion.
Book Synopsis The Phantom Public by : Walter Lippmann
Download or read book The Phantom Public written by Walter Lippmann and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Virtual Politics written by Andrew Wilson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: States like Russia and Ukraine may not have gone back to totalitarianism or the traditional authoritarian formula of stuffing the ballot box, cowing the population and imprisoning the opposition - or not obviously. But a whole industry of 'political technology' has developed instead, with shadowy private firms and government 'fixers' on lucrative contracts dedicated to the black arts of organizing electoral success. This book uncovers the sophisticated techniques of the 'virtual' political system used to legitimize post-Soviet regimes; entire fake parties, phantom political rivals and 'scarecrow' opponents. And it exposes the paramount role of the mass media in projecting these creations and in falsifying the entire political process. Wilson argues that it is not primarily economic problems that have made it so difficult to develop meaningful democracy in the former Soviet world. Although the West also has its 'spin doctors', dirty tricks, and aggressive ad campaigns, it is the unique post-Bolshevik culture of 'political technology' that is the main obstacle to better governance in the region, to real popular participation in public affairs, and to the modernization of the political economy in the longer term.
Book Synopsis Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic by : Stephen Skowronek
Download or read book Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic written by Stephen Skowronek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful dissection of one of the fundamental problems in American governance today: the clash between presidents determined to redirect the nation through ever-tighter control of administration and an executive branch still organized to promote shared interests in steady hands, due deliberation, and expertise. President Trump pitted himself repeatedly against the institutions and personnel of the executive branch. In the process, two once-obscure concepts came center stage in an eerie faceoff. On one side was the specter of a "Deep State" conspiracyadministrators threatening to thwart the will of the people and undercut the constitutional authority of the president they elected to lead them. On the other side was a raw personalization of presidential power, one that a theory of "the unitary executive" gussied up and allowed to run roughshod over reason and the rule of law. The Deep State and the unitary executive framed every major contest of the Trump presidency. Like phantom twins, they drew each other out. These conflicts are not new. Stephen Skowronek, John A. Dearborn, and Desmond King trace the tensions between presidential power and the depth of the American state back through the decades and forward through the various settlements arrived at in previous eras. Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic is about the breakdown of settlements and the abiding vulnerabilities of a Constitution that gave scant attention to administrative power. Rather than simply dump on Trump, the authors provide a richly historical perspective on the conflicts that rocked his presidency, and they explain why, if left untamed, the phantom twins will continue to pull the American government apart.
Book Synopsis When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: Rethinking Democracy In China by : John Keane
Download or read book When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: Rethinking Democracy In China written by John Keane and published by #N/A. This book was released on 2017-08-04 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Predictions of the coming collapse of Chinese politics are today commonplace, however this thought-provoking book explores a radically different alternative. China, it argues, is a one-party-dominated political system whose surprising levels of public support and resilience in the face of serious economic, environmental and social problems suggest that it is more durable than most outside observers suppose. China is not an ailing 'autocracy', a case of 'crony capitalism' or a blindly repressive 'authoritarian regime'. The rulers of China are in fact experimenting with a wide range of locally-made democratic tools designed to win the trust and loyalty of their subjects. Examples probed in this book include the injection of accountability mechanisms into state bureaucracy, the toleration of independent public opinion leaders, the growing reliance of Party officials and corporate executives on public opinion polls and 'democratic style', and the calculated use by Party officials of digitally networked media as early warning devices.Written for students and teachers, researchers and general readers fascinated by the rising global power of China, When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter shows why locally-made democratic practices often favour one-party rule and why China is becoming a globally significant political laboratory: a 21st century testing ground for a new type of top-down popular government at odds with power-sharing democracy as it was known during the past generation.
Book Synopsis Political Technology by : Andrew Wilson
Download or read book Political Technology written by Andrew Wilson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Political technology' is a Russian term for the professional engineering of politics. It has turned Russian politics into theatre and propaganda, and metastasised to take over foreign policy and weaponise history. The war against Ukraine is one outcome. In the West, spin doctors and political consultants do more than influence media or run campaigns: they have also helped build parallel universes of alternative political reality. Hungary has used political technology to dismantle democracy. The BJP in India has used it to consolidate unprecedented power. Different countries learn from each other. Some types of political technology have become notorious, like troll farms or data mining; but there is now a global wholesale industry selling a range of manipulation techniques, from astroturfing to fake parties to propaganda apps. This book shows that 'political technology' is about much more than online disinformation: it is about whole new industries of political engineering.
Book Synopsis Democracy and Media Decadence by : John Keane
Download or read book Democracy and Media Decadence written by John Keane and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a revolutionary age of communicative abundance in which many media innovations - from satellite broadcasting to smart glasses and electronic books - spawn great fascination mixed with excitement. In the field of politics, hopeful talk of digital democracy, cybercitizens and e-government has been flourishing. This book admits the many thrilling ways that communicative abundance is fundamentally altering the contours of our lives and of our politics, often for the better. But it asks whether too little attention has been paid to the troubling counter-trends, the decadent media developments that encourage public silence and concentrations of unlimited power, so weakening the spirit and substance of democracy. Exploring examples of clever government surveillance, market censorship, spin tactics and back-channel public relations, John Keane seeks to understand and explain these trends, and how best to deal with them. Tackling some tough but big and fateful questions, Keane argues that 'media decadence' is deeply harmful for public life.
Book Synopsis To Kill A Democracy by : Debasish Roy Chowdhury
Download or read book To Kill A Democracy written by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India is heralded as the world's largest democracy. Yet, there is now growing alarm about its democratic health. To Kill a Democracy gets to the heart of the matter. Combining poignant life stories with sharp scholarly insight, it rejects the belief that India was once a beacon of democracy but is now being ruined by the destructive forces of Modi-style populism. The book details the much deeper historical roots of the present-day assaults on civil liberties and democratic institutions. Democracy, the authors also argue, is much more than elections and the separation of powers. It is a whole way of life lived in dignity, and that is why they pay special attention to the decaying social foundations of Indian democracy. In compelling fashion, the book describes daily struggles for survival and explains how lived social injustices and unfreedoms rob Indian elections of their meaning, while at the same time feeding the decadence and iron-fisted rule of its governing institutions. Much more than a book about India, To Kill A Democracy argues that what is happening in the country is globally important, and not just because every third person living in a democracy is an Indian. It shows that when democracies rack and ruin their social foundations, they don't just kill off the spirit and substance of democracy. They lay the foundations for despotism.
Book Synopsis Democracy, Participation and Contestation by : Emmanuelle Avril
Download or read book Democracy, Participation and Contestation written by Emmanuelle Avril and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-07 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The establishment of democracy on both sides of the Atlantic has not been a smooth evolution towards an idealized presumed endpoint. Far from it, democratization has been marked by setbacks and victories, a process often referred to as ‘contested democracy’. In view of recent mobilizations such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, in which new technologies have played a key role, there is a need for a renewed analysis of the long-term evolution of US and UK political systems. Using new areas of research, this book argues that the ideals and the practices of Anglo-American democracy can be best understood by studying diverse forms of participation, which go beyond classical expressions of contestation and dissent such as voting. The authors analyze political parties, social movements, communications and social media, governance, cultural diversity, identity politics, public-private actors and social cohesion to illustrate how the structure and context of popular participation play a significant role in whether, and when, citizens ́ efforts have any meaningful impact on those who exercise political power. In doing so, the authors take crucial steps towards understanding how a vigorous public sphere and popular sovereignty can be made to work in today’s global environment. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, British and US history, democracy, political participation, governance, social movements and politics.
Book Synopsis Reinforcing Authoritarianism Through Democracy by : Xuan Qin
Download or read book Reinforcing Authoritarianism Through Democracy written by Xuan Qin and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-25 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides empirical evidence to show how democratic experiments are harnessed to achieve control and support authoritarianism, through the lens of participatory pricing, which is one of the most important forms of deliberative democracy in China. The crucial point is an interlacement of easily perceptible improvement in empowerment (voluntary enrollment, disclosure of information and opportunities for expression during events) and hidden control (delicately designed procedures and pre-existing frameworks that influence participants in how they think, and when they talk). The mixture of these two mechanisms assures participants and educates them, producing cooperative citizens desired by the government. This is referred to as the partial empowerment strategy, which challenges the traditional assumption of the correlation between deliberation and empowerment. When authoritarian control influences deliberations in a form that obstructs the natural developmental process of empowerment, it acts as a filter that encourages only some form of empowerment, but precludes those that are too risky for the government. This exertion of dominance through a participatory form reflects the development of governance capability of China as a modern authoritarian state and explains its “surprising” resilience.
Book Synopsis Renovating Democracy by : Nathan Gardels
Download or read book Renovating Democracy written by Nathan Gardels and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis The Public and Its Problems by : John Dewey
Download or read book The Public and Its Problems written by John Dewey and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An annotated edition of John Dewey's work of democratic theory, first published in 1927. Includes a substantive introduction and bibliographical essay"--Provided by publisher.
Book Synopsis To Kill a Democracy by : Debasish Roy Chowdhury
Download or read book To Kill a Democracy written by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India is heralded as the world's largest democracy. Yet, in recent years there has been growing alarm about its democratic health. To Kill a Democracy gets to the heart of the matter.Combining poignant life stories with sharp scholarly insight, it rejects the belief that India was once a beacon of democracy but is now being ruined by the destructive forces of populism. Democracy, the authors argue, is much more than government based on elections. Instead, they pay specialattention to the social emergency confronting Indian democracy. In compelling fashion, they describe daily struggles for survival and explain how great social injustices rob Indian elections of their meaning, while at the same time feeding the decadence and iron-fisted rule of its governinginstitutions. Much more than a book about India, To Kill A Democracy argues that what is happening there is globally important, and not just because every second person living in a democracy is an Indian. It shows that when democracies rack and ruin their social foundations they don't just kill offthe spirit and substance of democracy. They lay the foundations for despotism.
Book Synopsis China's Galaxy Empire by : John Keane
Download or read book China's Galaxy Empire written by John Keane and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In China's Galaxy Empire target a development of enormous significance: China's return, after two centuries of decline and subjugation, to a position of prominence in world affairs. The daring thesis is that China is a newly rising empire of a kind never before witnessed: a galaxy empire. The first to be born of the digital communications era, this young empire is economically and politically powerful, and heavily armed. Its gravitational, push-pull effects are impacting every continent--and even outer space, where China is competing with the United States, India, and Europe to become the leading power. The galaxy empire interpretation rejects clich?d misdescriptions of China as a "big power" or monolithic "autocracy", and it explains why China defies older definitions of land, sea, and air-based empires. The book charts the developments that have made its rising empire so novel, including the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, the rapid rise of a global Chinese middle class, and internal colonialism in Tibet and Xinjiang. The book notes the protean, shapeshifting qualities of this young empire. It therefore warns against the political and military perils of simple-minded, friend-versus-enemy thinking and "Big China, Bad China" politics. But it also proffers a forewarning to China's rulers: while every rising empire aims to shift the balance of power in its favour, no empire lasts forever, and some are stillborn, because they indulge illusions of greatness and reckless power adventures.
Book Synopsis Proving Election Fraud by : Richard Charnin
Download or read book Proving Election Fraud written by Richard Charnin and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2004, John Kerry appeared to be a clear winner based on the exit polls. But the recorded vote counts deviated sharply from the polls and were too one-sided to attribute to mere chance. The political pundits claimed the polls “behaved badly”, calling the three million Bush margin a “mandate”. They failed to report the impossible late adjustments made to the National, Florida and Ohio exit polls that were necessary to force them to match the recorded vote. Spreadsheet-wielding Internet bloggers analyzed the statistical anomalies. Online election forums were aflame with debates about state and national pre-election and exit polls, Bush approval ratings, margins of error, non-response, past vote recall, correlation between vote swing from 2000 and the exit poll shift, the counter-intuitive Bush gain over his 2000 vote share in urban locations compared to the decline in rural areas (the "Urban Legend"). But the “Smoking Gun” was the Final National Exit Poll, which indicated that there were four million more returning Bush 2000 voters than were alive in 2004. This “phantom voter” anomaly has never been discussed by pundits in the media or political scientists in academia, even though similar anomalies occurred in 1988, 1992 and 2008. The media pundits still claim that the recorded vote is correct (and the exit polls wrong) despite millions of uncounted votes in every election. This book is a comprehensive resource for analyzing presidential elections from 1968 to 2008, including the 2006 midterms. It is written for readers of virtually all backgrounds. The only requirement is an inquisitive, open mind. The True Vote is estimated using basic statistical modeling that is for some reason avoided in the media and academia. Internet links to several election analysis spreadsheet models are provided in the book and are free to download.
Download or read book Repressed Spaces written by Paul Carter and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2004-11-02 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Repressed Spaces Paul Carter tours the cultural history of agoraphobia, the fear of open space. Its symptoms were first described in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton, the British scholar and writer, although it wasn’t until 1871 that Carl Otto Westphal coined the term to describe several of his patients who experienced severe anxiety when walking through streets or squares. There have been many attempts to explain and treat the condition: critics of modernization have linked it to bad city planning; psychoanalysts, calling it "street panic", have blamed it on the Oedipus complex; psychiatrists have tied it to existential insecurity and describe it as the fear of places or situations that have triggered panic attacks. Freud believed that agoraphobia, like all phobias, was part of an "anxiety neurosis" and had a sexual origin. Taking as his starting-point the fact that Freud himself was agoraphobic, and analyzing the way people have negotiated open spaces from Greek and Roman times to the present day, Paul Carter finds that "space fear" ultimately results from the inhibition of movement. Along the way, the author asks why Freud repressed his agoraphobia, and examines literature, the work of architects and theorists – including Le Corbusier, Walter Benjamin and R. D. Laing – artists such as Munch, Lapique and Giacometti, and the German "street films" of the 1920s. He concludes by proposing a new way of regarding open space, a new "poetics of agoraphobia", one that is sensitive to the agoraphobe’s point of view and provides lessons for architects and urban planners today.
Book Synopsis Democracy and the Policy Sciences by : Peter deLeon
Download or read book Democracy and the Policy Sciences written by Peter deLeon and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1997-08-21 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As originally proposed by Harold Lasswell, the policy sciences were dedicated to democratic governance. But today they are far removed from the democratic process and do little to promote the American democratic system. This book examines how in the context of American history and the development of the policy sciences, a more democratic, participatory policy analysis could be conceptualized in theory and administered in practice. Peter deLeon argues that for the policy sciences to move toward democracy, they must accept a new analytic paradigm that draws heavily on critical thinking and the writing of post-positivism. To further that end, he presents a "minipopulist" procedure that will allow more citizen participation without hamstringing the processes of government.
