Thinking about Democracy PDF Download

Author: Arend Lijphart
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135980306
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This book draws on Professor Arend Lijphart’s lifetime experience of research and publication in democracy and comparative politics and collects together for the first time his most significant and influential work.

Author: Arend Lijphart
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135980292
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
Arend Lijphart is one of the world's leading and most influential political scientists whose work has had a profound impact on the study of democracy and comparative politics. Thinking about Democracy draws on a lifetime's experience of research and publication in this area and collects together for the first time his most significant and influential work. The book also contains an entirely new introduction and conclusion where Professor Lijphart assesses the development of his thought and the practical impact it has had on emerging democracies. This volume will be of enormous interest to all students and scholars of democracy and comparative politics, and politics and international relations in general.

Author: Arend Lijphart
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415772672
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
"This book is a selection of his key essays on the distinction between power sharing and majoritarian forms of democracy and on the two crucial alternatives in constitution-making that guide a democracy in the direction of either power sharing or majoritarianism - the choice of electoral system and the choice between parliamentary and presidential government. The essays include his best known articles and chapters, but also those that have appeared in less accessible journals and books. They are placed in historical and intellectual context by a substantial new introduction outlining the developments in Lijphart's thought."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Geoffrey Brennan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521585248
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
"The significance of this account should be clear. If, as economists frequently assert, proper diagnosis of the disease is a crucial prerequisite to treatment, then the design of appropriate democratic institutions depends critically on a coherent analysis of the way the electoral process works and the perversities to which it is prone. The claim is that the interest-based account incorrectly diagnoses the disease. Accordingly, this book ends with an account of the institutional protections that go with expressive voting."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Michael E. Morrell
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271074353
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Democracy harbors within it fundamental tensions between the ideal of giving everyone equal consideration and the reality of having to make legitimate, binding collective decisions. Democracies have granted political rights to more groups of people, but formal rights have not always guaranteed equal consideration or democratic legitimacy. It is Michael Morrell’s argument in this book that empathy plays a crucial role in enabling democratic deliberation to function the way it should. Drawing on empirical studies of empathy, including his own, Morrell offers a “process model of empathy” that incorporates both affect and cognition. He shows how this model can help democratic theorists who emphasize the importance of deliberation answer their critics.

Author: Nicholas T. Davis
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472220381
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Democracy’s Meanings challenges conventional wisdom regarding how the public thinks about and evaluates democracy. Mining both political theory and more than 75 years of public opinion data, the book argues that Americans think about democracy in ways that go beyond voting or elected representation. Instead, citizens have rich and substantive views about the material conditions that democracy should produce, which draw from their beliefs about equality, fairness, and justice. The authors construct a typology of views about democracy. Procedural views of democracy take a minimalistic quality. While voting and fair treatment are important to this vision of democracy, ideas about equality are mostly limited to civil liberties. In contrast, social views of democracy incorporate both civil and economic equality; according to people with these views, democracy ought to meet the basic social and material needs of citizens. Complementing these two groups are moderate and indifferent views about democracy. While moderate views sit somewhere in between procedural and social perspectives regarding the role of democracy in producing social and economic equality, indifferent views of democracy involve disaffection toward it. For a small group of apathetic citizens, democracy is an ambiguous and ill-defined concept.

Author: Jeffrey Puryear
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801848414
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Because of Latin America's long history of military juntas, analysts who have studied regime change in the region have focused on political and military elites. In the recent case of Chile, however, the success of democratic transition can be credited in large part to the remarkable influence of intellectuals involved in public affairs. In Thinking Politics Jeffrey Puryear examines this unprecedented role played by intellectuals inChile's return to democracy. "Thinking Politics provides thorough coverage of an important but neglected topic by a uniquely qualified observer. Through his work with the Ford Foundation, Jeffrey Puryear had an unparalleled opportunity for an outside agent to witness the development of the social scientists of Chile and their impact on democratization. He tells the story well, he analyzes it in a way that could be relevant to other cases, and he presents the policy implications for support of the social sciences in less developed countries in a convincing manner." -- Paul W. Drake, University of California, San Diego "This first-rate work is accurate, original, and compelling. It addresses an important topic -- the relationship between ideas and politics -- that has seldom been analyzed in Latin America." -- JosA(c) JoaquA-n Brunner Ried, Facultad Latina Americana de Ciencias Sociales, Santiago, Chile.

Author: James S. Fishkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192551906
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Democracy requires a connection to the 'will of the people'. What does that mean in a world of 'fake news', relentless advocacy, dialogue mostly among the like-minded, and massive spending to manipulate public opinion? What kind of opinion can the public have under such conditions? What would democracy be like if the people were really thinking in depth about the policies they must live with? If they really 'deliberated' with good information about their political choices? This book argues that 'deliberative democracy' is not utopian. It is a practical solution to many of democracy's ills. It can supplement existing institutions with practical reforms. It can apply at all levels of government and for many different kinds of policy choices. This volume speaks to a recurring dilemma: listen to the people and get the angry voices of populism or rely on widely distrusted elites and get policies that seem out of touch with the public's concerns. Instead, there are methods for getting a representative and thoughtful public voice that is really worth listening to. Democracy is under siege in most countries, where democratic institutions have low approval and face a resurgent threat from authoritarian regimes. Deliberative democracy can provide an antidote and can reinvigorate our democratic politics. This book draws on the author's research with many collaborators on 'Deliberative Polling'-a process conducted in 27 countries on six continents. It contributes both to political theory and to the empirical study of public opinion and participation. It should interest anyone concerned about the future of democracy and how it can be revitalized.

Author: Bonnie Honig
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823276422
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health .State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. In Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, Bonnie Honig asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be? Following Tocqueville, who extolled the virtues of “pursuing in common the objects of common desires,” Honig focuses not on the demos but on the objects of democratic life. Democracy, as she points out, postulates public things—infrastructure, monuments, libraries—that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be “gathered up” refers to the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of “transitional objects”—the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of Public Things is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves. Public Things attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, who saw how things fabricated by humans lend stability to the human world, Honig shows how Arendt and Winnicott—both theorists of livenesss—underline the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.

Author: Fathali M. Moghaddam
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
ISBN: 9781433820878
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Fathali M. Moghaddam explores how psychological factors influence the presence, potential development, or absence of democracy. Recommendations are given for promoting the psychological processes that foster democracy. Where democracy thrives, it seems far and away the best system of governance. Yet, relatively few countries have managed to transition successfully to democracy, and none of them have attained what Fathali M. Moghaddam calls "actualized democracy," the ideal in which all citizens share full, informed, equal participation in decision making. The obstacles to democratization are daunting, yet there is hope. What is it about human nature that seems to work for or against democracy? The Psychology of Democracy explores political development through the lens of psychological science. He examines the psychological factors influencing whether and how democracy develops within a society, identifies several conditions necessary for democracy (such as freedom of speech, minority rights, and universal suffrage), and explains how psychological factors influence these conditions. He also recommends steps to promote in citizens the psychological characteristics that foster democracy. Written in a style that is both accessible and intellectually engaging, the book skillfully integrates research and an array of illustrative examples from psychology, political science and international relations, history, and literature.