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Democratization is a major political phenomenon of the age and has been the focus of a burgeoning political science literature. This book considers democratization across a range of disciplines, from anthropology and economics, to sociology, law and area studies. The construction of democratization as a unit of study reflects the intellectual standpoint of the inquirer. The book highlights the use of normative argument to legitimize the exercise of power. From the 1950s to the 1980s, economic success enabled the authoritarian governments of South Korea and Taiwan to achieve a large measure of popular support despite the absence of democracy. The book outlines what a feminist framework might be and analyses feminist engagements with the theory and practice of democratization. It also shows how historians have contributed to the understanding of the processes of democratization. International Political Economy (IPE) has always had the potential to cut across the levels-of-analysis distinction. A legal perspective on democratization is presented by focusing on a tightly linked set of issues straddling the border between political and judicial power as they have arisen. Classic and contemporary sociological approaches to understanding democracy and democratization are highlighted, with particular attention being accorded to the post-1989 period. The book displays particularities within a common concern for institutional structures and their performance, ranging over the representation of women, electoral systems and constitutions (in Africa) and presidentialism (in Latin America). Both Europe and North America present in their different ways a kind of bridge between domestic and international dimensions of democratization.
order. They are wary of anything that remotely poses an existential threat to Party rule but, once reassured, seek to respond to public concerns. It is ‘normal’ for politics to seem complicated and confusing. The immediate exposure to politics comes through the traditional and social media, as well as the interaction with state employees. Much of the most influential political science literature on countries throughout the world focuses on how citizens seek to make sense of passing events on the basis of little knowledge and rudimentary understanding. Like
1 Perspectives peter burnell The Looking-Glass for the Mind; or Intellectual Mirror (1792) (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, 1989) In the last decade or so democratization has been the focus of a burgeoning political science literature. Democratization is multifaceted and multidimensional. As both an idea and a practical phenomenon it belongs exclusively to no single discipline or branch of academic learning, and to no one geographical area. The purpose of this book is to show how our knowledge and understanding of democratization are enriched by studying
Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intra-party democracy? This book is about improving our understanding of political parties as democratic organisations in the context of multi-level governance. It analyses the impact of European Union (EU) membership on power dynamics, focusing on the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party (PS), and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The purpose of this book is to investigate who within the three parties determines EU policies and selects EU specialists, such as the candidates for European parliamentary elections and EU spokespersons.
The book utilises a principal-agent framework to investigate the delegation of power inside the three parties across multiple levels and faces. It draws on over 65 original interviews with EU experts from the three national parties and the Party of European Socialists (PES) and an e-mail questionnaire. This book reveals that European policy has largely remained in the hands of the party leadership. Its findings suggest that the party grassroots are interested in EU affairs, but that interest rarely translates into influence, as information asymmetry between the grassroots and the party leadership makes it very difficult for local activists to scrutinise elected politicians and to come up with their own policy proposals. As regards the selection of EU specialists, such as candidates for the European parliamentary elections, this book highlights that the parties’ processes are highly political, often informal, and in some cases, undemocratic.
identity. This model (called ‘consociationalism’ in the political science literature) is intended to prevent the domination of the state by one ‘ethnic’ or ‘sectarian’ group, such as was apparent in the fifty-year Unionist hegemony over post-partition Northern Ireland, and within those bounds it can be said to have succeeded despite a few recent wobbles. But various political crises over the last five years (the Renewable Heat Incentive or ‘cash for ash’ scandal, the deadlock over the proposed Irish Language Act, the ongoing attempts of the DUP to prevent the effective
engagement that are wider than those which dominate much of the existing literature on citizenship and popular culture. The traditional and well-established approach within political science literature on civic engagement has been to focus on the relationship between citizens and government. In this literature, as Youniss et al. (2002: 125) point out, knowledge of the structure and function of government, and activities directed at influencing them (such as voting), are identified as behavioural and attitudinal indicators of ‘engagement’. We would agree that these forms of
and capacity in developed countries. The governance literature seeks to offer new forms of analysis of governing systems in the transforming political arenas after the 1980s. This new set of approaches has prompted a renewed debate on the state. The debate on governance has helped bring the state back into political science literature partly because the period during which government was supposed to address many of the key political issues in society was replaced by a new era in which the term ‘governance’ was employed to address the set of governing processes. That
challenges outlined above (Pierre and Peters 2000: 1, 18). The concept of governance emerged as a new vehicle to address changing politics and society from the 1970s. In the past thirty years there has been a significant growth in the study of governance within political science. Governance literature seeks to offer new forms of analysis of the governing system under the emergent political conditions after the 1980s and 1990s. Interestingly, the debate on governance has helped bring the state back into political science literature, especially in Europe; for example, one
cataclysmic or profound in its consequences that it is deemed worthy of a chapter in its own right, for example ‘Suez’, ‘1922’ or ‘Appeasement’ (Harris, 2011). In adopting this approach Harris is not out of step with the rich tradition of Conservative historiography (Hayton, 2012a: 6–9), nor indeed with much of the political science literature which has also had a lot to say about the party’s leading figures, epitomised perhaps by the title of Tim Bale’s (2010) work, The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron. Political scientists have also had a great deal to say
relationship between hierarchies and networks has been constant, the practical operationalization of this theoretically derived objective has been in constant motion throughout the study. The structure of the book at hand echoes these analytical movements. This chapter serves as an introduction and general overview. Chapter 2 starts with an overview of how the relationship between (hierarchical) government and (networked) governance is treated in recent political science literature. In the second part of the chapter I discuss the