In The Politics of Postal Transformation Robert Campbell investigates and analyses the most important policy innovations in recent years as countries struggle to create a postal regime that matches domestic political expectations with international and technological realities.
The postal system is a multi-billion dollar industry and one of the world's largest employers. Until recently it has been controlled by government-owned monopolies designed to provide universal postal service. However, in response to technological and international competition as well as public disenchantment with subsidies and inefficiencies, governments have embraced a range of new strategies. The Politics of Postal Transformation investigates the most important policy innovations that have been instituted to match domestic political expectations with international and technological realities. Robert Campbell's comparative analysis provides recommendations for policy-makers around the world and lays the foundation for informed speculation about the possible future domination of the system by a select group of postal behemoths. Book jacket.
Today, politics is big business. Most of the 6 billion spent during the 2012 campaign went to highly paid political consultants. In Building a Business of Politics, a lively history of political consulting, Adam Sheingate examines the origins of the industry and its consequences for American democracy.
Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.
Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ?organized over-world?, the ?state employing mafia methods? and the ?adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules. ÿ
Christopher Shaw, the book's author said, "Through preferential postage rates for nonprofits the Postal Service facilitates civic involvement and a healthy democracy." Nader also noted, "Postal employees are fairly remunerated in an increasingly low-wage, low benefit 'Wal-Mart' economy." According to Nader, "Post offices serve as the heart of community life in neighborhoods and towns nationwide and the presence of postal workers on community streets make them safer, as the many beneficiaries of their frequently heroic efforts attest." "The lack of citizen-consumers' involvement in the recently passed postal reform legislation has highlighted the need for a public dialogue about the future of our postal system. The book provides a starting point for that conversation," stated Nader.
A masterful history of a long underappreciated institution, How the Post Office Created America examines the surprising role of the postal service in our nation’s political, social, economic, and physical development. The founders established the post office before they had even signed the Declaration of Independence, and for a very long time, it was the U.S. government’s largest and most important endeavor—indeed, it was the government for most citizens. This was no conventional mail network but the central nervous system of the new body politic, designed to bind thirteen quarrelsome colonies into the United States by delivering news about public affairs to every citizen—a radical idea that appalled Europe’s great powers. America’s uniquely democratic post powerfully shaped its lively, argumentative culture of uncensored ideas and opinions and made it the world’s information and communications superpower with astonishing speed. Winifred Gallagher presents the history of the post office as America’s own story, told from a fresh perspective over more than two centuries. The mandate to deliver the mail—then “the media”—imposed the federal footprint on vast, often contested parts of the continent and transformed a wilderness into a social landscape of post roads and villages centered on post offices. The post was the catalyst of the nation’s transportation grid, from the stagecoach lines to the airlines, and the lifeline of the great migration from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It enabled America to shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy and to develop the publishing industry, the consumer culture, and the political party system. Still one of the country’s two major civilian employers, the post was the first to hire women, African Americans, and other minorities for positions in public life. Starved by two world wars and the Great Depression, confronted with the country’s increasingly anti-institutional mind-set, and struggling with its doubled mail volume, the post stumbled badly in the turbulent 1960s. Distracted by the ensuing modernization of its traditional services, however, it failed to transition from paper mail to email, which prescient observers saw as its logical next step. Now the post office is at a crossroads. Before deciding its future, Americans should understand what this grand yet overlooked institution has accomplished since 1775 and consider what it should and could contribute in the twenty-first century. Gallagher argues that now, more than ever before, the imperiled post office deserves this effort, because just as the founders anticipated, it created forward-looking, communication-oriented, idea-driven America.
This book examines the political, economic and social transformation of the six member-states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the ways in which these states are both shaping, and being reshaped by, the processes of globalisation. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the volume combines thematic chapters focusing on issues such as globalisation, nationalism and identity, political thinking, and economic diversification and redistributive policymaking with empirical chapters studying specific aspects of reform and change: the emergence of governing markets the rise of Sovereign Wealth Funds Islamic Finance the relationship between energy and sustainability trends in foreign aid donorship, strategic and foreign policy formulation. Contributions from experts in the field provide cutting-edge snapshots of a region in flux and collectively offer a roadmap of its repositioning in the global order, examining the interaction between global processes and internal dynamics of change and resistance that inject new dimensions into debates over the loci of local and global transformations and the manner in which each plays off the other. Situating the Gulf States firmly within their global twenty-first century context, this book will hold particular appeal to theorists of globalisation as well as to scholars of comparative politics, international political economy and area studies.