Advocacy in the United States and the European Union
Presents the study of lobbying strategies and outcomes in the United States and the European Union. This book challenges the stereotypes that attribute any differences between the two systems to cultural ones - the American, a partisan and combative approach, and the European, a consensus-based one.
Integrating comparative politics and international relations perspectives, this volume provides a critical analysis of the role of international and transnational actors in contemporary democratization processes in the Americas. It covers recent challenges to democracy in Venezuela, Haiti, and Ecuador along with current debates about election ......
How does a democracy deal with threats to its stability and continued existence when those threats come from political parties that play the democratic game? In Defending Democracy, political scientist Giovanni Capoccia studies key European nations between World Wars I and II which survived such democratic crises. A comprehensive and thoughtful ......
Political parties and elections are the mainsprings of modern democracy. In this classic volume, Richard S. Katz explores the problem of how a given electoral system affects the role of political parties and the way in which party members are elected. He develops and tests a theory of the differences in the cohesion, ideological behavior, and ......
It's tough to keep students afloat in a sea of detail when moving from country to country in a comparative course. While it's important to give students a sense of place, lengthy textbooks can overwhelm them with far too much description. Students are left with no clear path for understanding regional context or for making meaningful cross-national comparisons, and little sense of larger concepts and themes. The Politics of Governing: A Comparative Introduction answers this dilemma in a truly brief text-only 320 pages long-that frames country case studies within regional chapters. This approach equips students to see the bigger picture and understand how the issues of governing can no longer be separated from events outside a country's borders. The authors answer the same set of questions in each chapter-What are the purposes of government (the ends of politics)? What do governments do (the functions of politics)? Who exercises political power (the processes of politics)?-giving this concise text strong analysis of particular countries within a powerful regional framework. The book incorporates the American experience as a familiar touch point for students and examines those areas of the world in which the U.S. is most engaged: The European chapters highlight the development of supranational institutions and their impact on politics in Great Britain, France, and Germany. These stand in contrast to the transitional politics underway to the east with Central Europe's new democracies and the upheavals in Russia, the Ukraine, and the Balkan states keeping those countries at the margins of this new Europe. The diversity of Asian governments is explored within the context of competing forces between markets and democracy, at the core of which stands mainland China. The forces of religion and culture across the Muslim world shape the chapter that encompasses North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, with country case studies focused on Morocco, Iran, and Indonesia. The chapter on Latin America highlights the draw of North American markets and the appeal of distinctive political and economic patterns in South America, with case studies on Mexico and Brazil. A final chapter on regional convergence examines both developing countries and competing supranational markets to understand how people in countries caught in between larger, competing regional trading blocs are affected.
The political transformation of Taiwan from an authoritarian regime into a democracy is one of the great political sagas of the 20th century. Defeated on the China mainland, the Kuomintang established a new polity on Taiwan that allowed for four remarkable patterns of political development. These patterns reflect a complex political process of ......
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, foreign policy analysts and international relations scholars expected communist Cuba to undergo transitions to democracy and to markets as had the Eastern European nations of the former Soviet bloc. But more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Castro remains in power, with no sign that the ......
The last quarter of the twentieth century was marked by two dramatic political trends that altered many of the world's regimes: the global resurgence of democracy and the collapse of communism. Was the process that brought down communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union fundamentally different from the process that gave birth to new ......
The end of the Cold War, the ''third wave'' of democratization, and economic globalization have presented the newly industrialized countries of East Asia and the liberal democracies of Latin America with increasingly similar international opportunities and constraints. During the 1980s, Latin America made great strides in democratization, while ......
