Working from the basis of Arend Lijphart's 1968 work on divided societies, the authors go on to look at such cultures and subcultures thirty years on, bringing in new evidence and analysis to bear on the issue. They also examine the essential role of party politics within and between these ^D", framing comparisons with a number of countries from Belgium to Israel.
This book grew out of the authors' growing sense of frustration with the tenor of the debate over the health of the American political party system. Conventional party theory, they contend, had become a theoretical straitjacket providing little understanding of the transformed contemporary American party system. Baer and Bositis present a theory--based on a combination of elite, interest group, and social movement theories--in an effort to redefine the terms of the debate. They argue that political action within and outside of the party system is elite and group-based and that the group concept incorporates and accounts for elite-mass interdependence. Coming at a time when many existing explanations of political party behavior are under increasing scrutiny, Elite Cadres and Party Coalitions offers a provocative new theory. It will be essential reading for students, scholars, and members of the general public interested in American politics. The authors have divided their argument into two parts, the first of which is an extensive review of the history of party reform and contemporary assessments of its meaning. Included in this review is a similarly extensive assessment of a variety of party and party-related theory and scholarship. This is followed by an explanation of their own party elite theory of democracy. The second half of the book is devoted to a test of the various theories of party behavior using survey data from The Party Elite Study and from the 1980 and 1984 National Election Studies. These data are used to make comparisons over time among four elite cadres in both parties: nominating convention delegates, national committee members, and state and county chairs in office in 1980 and 1984.
This paper is one of a series being prepared for the National Research Council's Committee on International Conflict Resolution. The committee was organized in late 1995 to respond to a growing need for prevention, management, and resolution of violent conflict in the international arena, a concern about the changing nature and context of such conflict in the post-Cold War era, and a recent expansion of knowledge in the field. The committee's main goal is to advance the practice of conflict resolution by using the methods and critical attitude of science to examine the effectiveness of various techniques and concepts that have been advanced for preventing, managing, and resolving international conflicts. The committee's research agenda has been designed to supplement the work of other groups, particularly the Carnegie Corporation of New York's Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, which issued its final report in December 1997. The committee has identified a number of specific techniques and concepts of current interest to policy practitioners and has asked leading specialists on each one to carefully review and analyze available knowledge and to summarize what is known about the conditions under which each is or is not effective. These papers present the results of their work.
Talk of politics in the United States today is abuzz with warring red and blue factions. The message is that Americans are split due to deeply-held beliefs—over abortion, gay marriage, stem-cell research, prayer in public schools. Is this cultural divide a myth, the product of elite partisans? Or is the split real? Yes, argue authors Mark Brewer and Jeffrey Stonecash—the cultural divisions are real. Yet they tell only half the story. Differences in income and economic opportunity also fuel division—a split along class lines. Cultural issues have not displaced class issues, as many believe. Split shows that both divisions coexist meaning that levels of taxation and the quality of healthcare matter just as much as the debate over the right to life versus the right to choose. The authors offer balanced, objective analysis, complete with a wealth of data-rich figures and tables, to explain the social trends underlying these class and cultural divides and then explore the response of the parties and voters. Offering solid empirical evidence, the authors show that how politicians, the media, and interest groups perceive citizen preferences—be they cultural or class based—determines whether or not the public gets what it wants. Simply put, each set of issues creates political conflict and debate that produce very different policies and laws. With a lively and highly readable narrative, students at every level will appreciate the brevity and punch of Split and come away with a more nuanced understanding of the divisions that drive the current American polity.
Democracy and Ethnic Conflict addresses the problem of establishing durable democratic institutions in societies afflicted by ethnic conflict. While the holding of multi-party elections usually plays a role in the ending of conflict, consolidating democracy presents a much larger challenge, as does preventing the perversion of democracy through the dominance of a particular ethnic group.
The 1994 Mid-Term elections, the ¿Republican Revolution¿ that returned control of both Houses of Congress to the Republicans for the first time in over 40 years, returned us to the state of ¿divided government¿ that has been the political norm since the 1950s. In this timely new revision of his instant classic, Morris Fiorina outlines the causes and consequences of ¿ticket-splitting¿ and divided government.
From Power Sharing to Democracy examines the theoretical underpinnings of power sharing as a means of achieving sustainable democratic governance. Contributors examine key areas, including Afghanistan, Cyprus, Kosovo, Macedonia, and South Africa, where power-sharing constitutions and political institutions have been employed or proposed. They provide an in-depth exploration of consociationalism, under which the previously warring ethnic communities are guaranteed a proportionate share of political offices and protection of their vital interests, and federalism, which provides for substantial territorial autonomy in cases where the communities are territorially segregated.
The Quality of Divided Democracies contemplates how democracy works, or fails to work, in ethnoculturally divided societies. It advances a new theoretical approach to assessing quality of democracy in divided societies, and puts it into practice with the focused comparison of two divided democracies—Estonia and Latvia. The book uses rich comparative data to tackle the vital questions of what determines a democracy’s level of inclusiveness and the ways in which minorities can gain access to the policy-making process. It uncovers a “presence–polarization dilemma” for minorities’ inclusion in the democratic process, which has implications for academic debates on minority representation and ethnic politics, as well as practical implications for international and national institutions’ promotion of minority rights.
