Political Power and Women's Representation in Latin America
Political Power and Women's Representation in Latin America

Author: Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-09-30

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0199780382

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The number of women elected to Latin American legislatures has grown significantly over the past thirty years. This increase in the number of women elected to national office is due, in large part, to gender-friendly electoral rules such as gender quotas and proportional electoral systems, and it has, in turn, fostered constituent support for representative democracy. Still, this book argues that women are gaining political voice and bringing women's issues to state agendas, but they are not gaining political power. Women are marginalized by the male majority in office and relegated to the least powerful committees and leadership posts, hindering progress toward real political equality. In Political Power and Women's Representation in Latin America, Leslie Schwindt-Bayer examines the causes and consequences of women's representation in Latin America. She does so by asking a series of politically relevant and theoretically challenging questions, including why the numbers of women in office have increased in some countries but vary across others; what the presence of women in office means for the way representatives legislate; and what consequences the election of women bears for representative democracy more generally. Schwindt-Bayer articulates a comprehensive theory of women's representation that analyzes and connects trends in relation to four facets of political representation: formal, descriptive, substantive and symbolic. She then tests this theory empirically using aggregate data from all eighteen Latin American democracies and original fieldwork in Argentina, Colombia and Costa Rica. Ultimately, this book communicates the complex and often incomplete nature of women's political representation in Latin America.

The Burden-Sharing Dilemma
The Burden-Sharing Dilemma

Author: Brian D. Blankenship

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2023-11-15

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1501772481

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The Burden-Sharing Dilemma examines the conditions under which the United States is willing and able to pressure its allies to assume more responsibility for their own defense. The United States has a mixed track record of encouraging allied burden-sharing—while it has succeeded or failed in some cases, it has declined to do so at all in others. This variation, Brian D. Blankenship argues, is because the United States tailors its burden-sharing pressure in accordance with two competing priorities: conserving its own resources and preserving influence in its alliances. Although burden-sharing enables great power patrons like the United States to lower alliance costs, it also empowers allies to resist patron influence. Blankenship identifies three factors that determine the severity of this burden-sharing dilemma and how it is managed: the latent military power of allies, the shared external threat environment, and the level of a patron's resource constraints. Through case studies of US alliances formed during the Cold War, he shows that a patron can mitigate the dilemma by combining assurances of protection with threats of abandonment and by exercising discretion in its burden-sharing pressure. Blankenship's findings dismantle assumptions that burden-sharing is always desirable but difficult to obtain. Patrons, as the book reveals, can in fact be reluctant to seek burden-sharing, and attempts to pass defense costs to allies can often be successful. At a time when skepticism of alliance benefits remains high and global power shifts threaten longstanding pacts, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma recalls and reconceives the value of burden-sharing and alliances.

Political Parties and Electoral Clientelism
Political Parties and Electoral Clientelism

Author: Sergiu Gherghina

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 3031372956

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Contemporary political parties often use state resources to win elections. In this context, electoral clientelism evolved from the straightforward vote buying to sophisticated exchanges in which the relationship between patrons (parties or candidates) and clients (voters) is sometimes difficult to grasp. We address the question how do the distributive politics and electoral clientelism interact, how these forms of interactions differ across various context, and what implications they bring for the functioning of political systems. The special issue provides theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to the burgeoning literature about the multi-faceted feature of electoral clientelism. It unfolds the complex relationship between distributive politics and clientelism, and conceptualizes electoral clientelism as a dynamic process that occurs through different sequences. It enriches the methodological tools aimed at investigating electoral clientelism. Finally, the special issue approaches clientelism from several perspectives and brings together substantive empirical evidence about the varieties of clientelism around the world.

The Pig Book
The Pig Book

Author: Citizens Against Government Waste

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Published: 2013-09-17

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 146685314X

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The federal government wastes your tax dollars worse than a drunken sailor on shore leave. The 1984 Grace Commission uncovered that the Department of Defense spent $640 for a toilet seat and $436 for a hammer. Twenty years later things weren't much better. In 2004, Congress spent a record-breaking $22.9 billion dollars of your money on 10,656 of their pork-barrel projects. The war on terror has a lot to do with the record $413 billion in deficit spending, but it's also the result of pork over the last 18 years the likes of: - $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa - $102 million to study screwworms which were long ago eradicated from American soil - $273,000 to combat goth culture in Missouri - $2.2 million to renovate the North Pole (Lucky for Santa!) - $50,000 for a tattoo removal program in California - $1 million for ornamental fish research Funny in some instances and jaw-droppingly stupid and wasteful in others, The Pig Book proves one thing about Capitol Hill: pork is king!

The Geopolitics of U.S. Overseas Troops and Withdrawal
The Geopolitics of U.S. Overseas Troops and Withdrawal

Author: Jo Jakobsen

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-02-25

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 3030944883

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Why is it so difficult for a great power or a hegemon to retrench its overseas military power? Specifically, why are U.S. military bases and troops still largely where they were five years ago, twenty years ago, or even seventy years ago? Through developing a theory of great-power persistence, this book offers an explanation. Closely aligned with neoclassical realism, the theory argues that the murkiness of the anarchic international system combines with specific psychological inclinations of individuals to produce “better-safe-than-sorry” policies. In the United States, decisions on troop deployments are powerfully influenced by the broader foreign-policy community. Its members tend to be risk-averse and highly sensitive to the possibility that even minor troop withdrawals might set off harmful geopolitical chain reactions. Preferring the status quo over any uncertain alternative, they want their country to continue to maximize its influence and project its military power abroad in order to steady wobbling geopolitical “dominoes.” The theory is put to the empirical test through a systematic analysis of U.S. overseas troop deployments, withdrawal attempts, and retrenchment resistance during the presidency of Donald Trump, which represents an ideal test case for these mechanisms. Even if U.S. voters elected a retrenchment advocate as president, and despite that the United States is a gradually declining power, the period saw very little change in U.S. overseas troop deployments. The book concludes that, barring any dramatic, unforeseeable international event, the vast network of overseas U.S. military bases and troops is likely to persist for a long time to come.

Implementing Term Limits
Implementing Term Limits

Author: Marjorie Ellen Sarbaugh-Thompson

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0472122738

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Today, 70 percent of the American public supports reforms that would limit the number of terms a state legislator may serve, and the advocacy group U.S. Term Limits promotes this reform at all levels of government. But are advocates correct that term limits ensure citizens dedicated to the common good—rather than self-serving career politicians—run government? Or does the enforced high rate of turnover undermine the legislature’s ability to function? In Implementing Term Limits, Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson and Lyke Thompson bring thirteen years of intensive research and 460 interviews to assess changes since Michigan’s implementation of term limits in 1993 and explore their implications. Paying special attention to term limits’ institutional effects, they also consider legislative representation, political accountability, and the role of the bureaucracy and interest groups in state legislatures. Their thorough study suggests that legislators are less accessible to officials and that there is a larger gap between legislators and their voters. Moreover, legislators become much more politically ambitious after term limits and spend more time on political activities. The selection of top chamber leaders is complicated by newcomers’ lack of knowledge about and experience working with the leaders they elect before being sworn in. As a result, term limits in Michigan fail to deliver on many of the “good government” promises that appeal to citizens. Implementing Term Limits makes a unique and valuable contribution to the debate over the best means by which to obtain truly democratic institutions.

Guide to U.S. Political Parties
Guide to U.S. Political Parties

Author: Marjorie R. Hershey

Publisher: CQ Press

Published: 2014-04-01

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 1483346455

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This one-volume reference presents the major conceptual approaches to the study of U.S. political parties and the national party system, describing the organization and behavior of U.S. political parties in thematic, narrative chapters that help undergraduate students better understand party origins, historical development, and current operations. Further, it provides researchers with in-depth analysis of important subtopics and connections to other aspects of politics. Key Features: Thematic, narrative chapters, organized into six major parts, provide the context, as well as in-depth analysis of the unique system of party politics in the United States. Top analysts of party politics provide insightful chapters that explore how and why the U.S. parties have changed over time, including major organizational transformations by the parties, behavioral changes among candidates and party activists, and attitudinal changes among their partisans in the electorate. The authors discuss the way the traditional concept of formal party organizations gave way over time to a candidate-centered model, fueled in part by changes in campaign finance, the rise of new communication technologies, and fragmentation of the electorate. This book is an ideal reference for students and researchers who want to develop a deeper understanding of the current challenges faced by citizens of republican government in the United States.

Electoral Engineering
Electoral Engineering

Author: Pippa Norris

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-02-09

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9780521536714

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From Kosovo to Kabul, the last decade witnessed growing interest in ?electoral engineering?. Reformers have sought to achieve either greater government accountability through majoritarian arrangements or wider parliamentary diversity through proportional formula. Underlying the normative debates are important claims about the impact and consequences of electoral reform for political representation and voting behavior. The study compares and evaluates two broad schools of thought, each offering contracting expectations. One popular approach claims that formal rules define electoral incentives facing parties, politicians and citizens. By changing these rules, rational choice institutionalism claims that we have the capacity to shape political behavior. Alternative cultural modernization theories differ in their emphasis on the primary motors driving human behavior, their expectations about the pace of change, and also their assumptions about the ability of formal institutional rules to alter, rather than adapt to, deeply embedded and habitual social norms and patterns of human behavior.

Congress and Its Members
Congress and Its Members

Author: Roger H. Davidson

Publisher: CQ Press

Published: 2019-07-12

Total Pages: 527

ISBN-13: 1544377398

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"I think Congress and Its Members is a near-perfect example of what a textbook is supposed to be. It provides a clear foundation of factual knowledge for students, along with an accessible summary of the current state of scholarly knowledge in the field, and well-chosen examples from today’s headlines to better enable students to understand the implications of what they have read." —James B. Cottrill, St. Cloud State University The Gold Standard for Congress Courses for Over Thirty Years Congress and Its Members offers comprehensive coverage of the U.S. Congress and the legislative process by examining the tension between Congress as a lawmaking institution and as a collection of politicians constantly seeking re-election. The highly anticipated Seventeenth Edition considers the 2018 elections and the Trump administration, discussing the agenda of the new Congress, White House–Capitol Hill relations, party and committee leadership changes, judicial appointments, and partisan polarization, in addition to covering changes to budgeting, campaign finance, lobbying, public attitudes about Congress, reapportionment, rules, and procedures. Always balancing great scholarship with currency, this bestseller features lively case material along with relevant data, charts, exhibits, maps, and photos. Instructors! Sign in at study.sagepub.com/davidson17e for additional teaching resources.