Strong Democracy

Strong Democracy

Author: Benjamin Barber

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780520242333

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"One of the chosen few: an enduring contribution to democratic thought."—Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University


Nineteen eighty-four

Nineteen eighty-four

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: DigiCat

Published: 2022-11-22

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13:

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This is a dystopian social science fiction novel and morality tale. The novel is set in the year 1984, a fictional future in which most of the world has been destroyed by unending war, constant government monitoring, historical revisionism, and propaganda. The totalitarian superstate Oceania, ruled by the Party and known as Airstrip One, now includes Great Britain as a province. The Party uses the Thought Police to repress individuality and critical thought. Big Brother, the tyrannical ruler of Oceania, enjoys a strong personality cult that was created by the party's overzealous brainwashing methods. Winston Smith, the main character, is a hard-working and skilled member of the Ministry of Truth's Outer Party who secretly despises the Party and harbors rebellious fantasies.


The Emerging Democratic Majority

The Emerging Democratic Majority

Author: John B. Judis

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2004-02-10

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0743254783

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ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR AND A WINNER OF THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY'S ANNUAL POLITICAL BOOK AWARD Political experts John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira convincingly use hard data -- demographic, geographic, economic, and political -- to forecast the dawn of a new progressive era. In the 1960s, Kevin Phillips, battling conventional wisdom, correctly foretold the dawn of a new conservative era. His book, The Emerging Republican Majority, became an indispensable guide for all those attempting to understand political change through the 1970s and 1980s. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the country in Republican hands, The Emerging Democratic Majority is the indispensable guide to this era. In five well-researched chapters and a new afterword covering the 2002 elections, Judis and Teixeira show how the most dynamic and fastest-growing areas of the country are cultivating a new wave of Democratic voters who embrace what the authors call "progressive centrism" and take umbrage at Republican demands to privatize social security, ban abortion, and cut back environmental regulations. As the GOP continues to be dominated by neoconservatives, the religious right, and corporate influence, this is an essential volume for all those discontented with their narrow agenda -- and a clarion call for a new political order.


Deepening Local Democracy in Latin America

Deepening Local Democracy in Latin America

Author: Benjamin Goldfrank

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-09-10

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 0271074515

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The resurgence of the Left in Latin America over the past decade has been so notable that it has been called “the Pink Tide.” In recent years, regimes with leftist leaders have risen to power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela. What does this trend portend for the deepening of democracy in the region? Benjamin Goldfrank has been studying the development of participatory democracy in Latin America for many years, and this book represents the culmination of his empirical investigations in Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In order to understand why participatory democracy has succeeded better in some countries than in others, he examines the efforts in urban areas that have been undertaken in the cities of Porto Alegre, Montevideo, and Caracas. His findings suggest that success is related, most crucially, to how nationally centralized political authority is and how strongly institutionalized the opposition parties are in the local arenas.


Freedom on the Offensive

Freedom on the Offensive

Author: William Michael Schmidli

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1501765167

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In Freedom on the Offensive, William Michael Schmidli illuminates how the Reagan administration's embrace of democracy promotion was a defining development in US foreign relations in the late twentieth century. Reagan used democracy promotion to refashion the bipartisan Cold War consensus that had collapsed in the late 1960s amid opposition to the Vietnam War. Over the course of the 1980s, the initiative led to a greater institutionalization of human rights—narrowly defined to include political rights and civil liberties and to exclude social and economic rights—as a US foreign policy priority. Democracy promotion thus served to legitimize a distinctive form of US interventionism and to underpin the Reagan administration's aggressive Cold War foreign policies. Drawing on newly available archival materials, and featuring a range of perspectives from top-level policymakers and politicians to grassroots activists and militants, this study makes a defining contribution to our understanding of human rights ideas and the projection of American power during the final decade of the Cold War. Using Reagan's undeclared war on Nicaragua as a case study in US interventionism, Freedom on the Offensive explores how democracy promotion emerged as the centerpiece of an increasingly robust US human rights agenda. Yet, this initiative also became intertwined with deeply undemocratic practices that misled the American people, violated US law, and contributed to immense human and material destruction. Pursued through civil society or low-cost military interventions and rooted in the neoliberal imperatives of US-led globalization, Reagan's democracy promotion initiative had major implications for post–Cold War US foreign policy.


Democracy Incorporated

Democracy Incorporated

Author: Sheldon S. Wolin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-08-29

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0691178488

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Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level. Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come. Now with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges, Democracy Incorporated remains an essential work for understanding the state of democracy in America.


Defining and Measuring Democracy

Defining and Measuring Democracy

Author: David Beetham

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 1994-11-29

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9781446226186

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The rapid worldwide phase of democratization since the 1980s has stimulated a renewed interest in how we define and measure democracy. The contributors to this volume include leading political theorists, political scientists and experts in comparative government from across Europe. Defining and Measuring Democracy offers an integrated analysis of key debates and issues ranging from the question of how to define democracy to the issue of cultural diversity. Each chapter offers new insights and approaches placed in the context of contemporary debates.


The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy

The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy

Author: John Agresto

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-10-15

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1501712918

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In The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy John Agresto traces the development of American judicial power, paying close attention to what he views as the very real threat of judicial supremacy. Agresto examines the role of the judiciary in a democratic society and discusses the proper place of congressional power in constitutional issues. Agresto argues that while the separation of congressional and judicial functions is a fundamental tenet of American government, the present system is not effective in maintaining an appropriate balance of power. He shows that continued judicial expansion, especially into the realm of public policy, might have severe consequences for America's national life and direction, and offers practical recommendations for safeguarding against an increasingly powerful Supreme Court. John Agresto's controversial argument, set in the context of a historical and theoretical inquiry, will be of great interest to scholars and students in political science and law, especially American constitutional law and political theory.


Democracy and Democratization

Democracy and Democratization

Author: Michael Moran

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-29

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1136857524

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Following the collapse of the former regimes of Eastern and Central Europe and Latin America the choice of all of the democratising countries was to move towards liberal democracy. Likewise in Africa, many authoriatarian regimes seem to be in retreat, perhaps most significantly in South Africa. Democracy seems to be the only valued political system of the late twentieth century, so that even China for example, describes itself as the people's democratic dictatorship. So have we really, as Francis Fukuyama suggested, reached the end of history? Should we not look seriously at the tension between liberalism and democracy which have led to dissatisfaction with the liberal model in countries such as Britain and France? Is it not important to discuss the real problems of stabilisation and survival which the democratising countries are experiencing? This timely collection examines questions of central concern to scholars and practitioners of politics. It looks at both the concept of democracy and the process of democratisation, combining theoretical chapters by historians of ideas and political theorists, with empirical chapters on the process of democratisation in Eastern Europe, China, The Middle East and Latin America, as well as in established democracies such as Britain and France.


Patterns of Democracy

Patterns of Democracy

Author: Arend Lijphart

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0300189125

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Examining 36 democracies from 1945 to 2010, this text arrives at conclusions about what type of democracy works best. It demonstrates that consensual systems stimulate economic growth, control inflation and unemployment, and limit budget deficits.