The unheavenly chorus Schlozman, Kay Lehman; Verba, Sidney; Brady, Henry E
2012., 20120409, 2012, 2012-04-09, 20120101
eBook
Politically active individuals and organizations make huge investments of time, energy, and money to influence everything from election outcomes to congressional subcommittee hearings to local school ...politics, while other groups and individual citizens seem woefully underrepresented in our political system.The Unheavenly Chorusis the most comprehensive and systematic examination of political voice in America ever undertaken--and its findings are sobering.
The Unheavenly Chorusis the first book to look at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests--membership associations such as unions, professional associations, trade associations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities. Drawing on numerous in-depth surveys of members of the public as well as the largest database of interest organizations ever created--representing more than thirty-five thousand organizations over a twenty-five-year period--this book conclusively demonstrates that American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality. The well educated and affluent are active in many ways to make their voices heard, while the less advantaged are not. This book reveals how the political voices of organized interests are even less representative than those of individuals, how political advantage is handed down across generations, how recruitment to political activity perpetuates and exaggerates existing biases, how political voice on the Internet replicates these inequalities--and more.
In a true democracy, the preferences and needs of all citizens deserve equal consideration. Yet equal consideration is only possible with equal citizen voice.The Unheavenly Chorusreveals how far we really are from the democratic ideal and how hard it would be to attain it.
Analysing parliamentary references to the people, this book provides a more nuanced interpretation of eighteenth-century re-evaluations of democracy. It shows how interaction between parliamentarians ...and the public sphere in different political cultures produced more modern conceptions of the legitimacy of political power.
Over the past century, opinion polls have come to pervade American politics. Despite their shortcomings, the notion prevails that polls broadly represent public sentiment. But do they? InSilent ...Voices, Adam Berinsky presents a provocative argument that the very process of collecting information on public preferences through surveys may bias our picture of those preferences. In particular, he focuses on the many respondents who say they "don't know" when asked for their views on the political issues of the day.
Using opinion poll data collected over the past forty years, Berinsky takes an increasingly technical area of research--public opinion--and synthesizes recent findings in a coherent and accessible manner while building on this with his own findings. He moves from an in-depth treatment of how citizens approach the survey interview, to a discussion of how individuals come to form and then to express opinions on political matters in the context of such an interview, to an examination of public opinion in three broad policy areas--race, social welfare, and war. He concludes that "don't know" responses are often the result of a systematic process that serves to exclude particular interests from the realm of recognized public opinion. Thus surveys may then echo the inegalitarian shortcomings of other forms of political participation and even introduce new problems altogether.
This collective volume – with contributions from experts on these regions – examines broader questions about the current crises (the Great Recession and the Commodity Crisis) and the associated ...changes in political representation in both regions.
It provides a general overview of political representation studies in Southern Europe and Latin America and builds bridges between the two traditions of political representation studies, affording greater understanding of developments in each region and promoting future research collaboration between Southern Europe and Latin America. Finally, the book addresses questions of continuity and change in patterns of political representation after the onset of the two economic crises, specifically examining such issues as changes in citizens’ democratic support and trust in political representatives and institutions, in-descriptive representation (in the socio-demographic profile of MPs) and in-substantive representation (in the link between voters and MPs in terms of ideological congruence and/or policy/issue orientations).
This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political elites, political representation, European and Latin American politics/studies, and more broadly to comparative politics.
Reformers have promoted mixed-member electoral systems as the "best of both worlds." In this volume, internationally recognized political scientists evaluate the ways in which the introduction of a ...mixed-member electoral system affects the configuration of political parties. The contributors examine several political phenomena, including cabinet post allocation, nominations, preelectoral coalitions, split-ticket voting, and the size of party systems and faction systems. Significantly, they also consider various ways in which the constitutional system— especially whether the head of government is elected directly or indirectly— can modify the incentives created by the electoral system. The findings presented here demonstrate that the success of electoral reform depends not only on the specification of new electoral rules per se but also on the political context— and especially the constitutional framework—within which such rules are embedded.
101 Chambers Squire, Peverill; Hamm, Keith E
2005, 20050101
eBook
Although legislative studies is thriving, it suffers from one glaring weakness: a lack of truly comparative, cross-institutional research. Instead, research focuses overwhelmingly on the U.S. ...Congress. This unfortunate fixation limits the way scholars approach the testing of many compelling theories of legislative organization and behavior, and it ignores the invaluable research possibilities that comparison with the 99 American state legislative chambers offers. State legislatures are easily compared to Congress: They arise out of the same political culture and history. Their members represent the same parties and face the same voters in the same elections using the same rules. And the functions and roles are the same, with each fully capable of initiating, debating, and passing legislation. None of the methodological problems found when comparing presidential system legislatures with parliamentary system legislatures arise when comparing Congress and the state legislatures. However, while there are great similarities, there are also important differences that provide scholars leverage for rigorously testing theories. The book compares and contrasts Congress and the state legislatures on histories, fundamental structures, institutional and organizational characteristics, and members. By highlighting the vast array of organizational schemes and behavioral patterns evidenced in state legislatures, the authors demonstrate that the potential for the study of American legislatures, as opposed to the separate efforts of Congressional and state legislative scholars, is too great to leave unexplored.
McNally explores why members of Congress choose to build reputations as advocates of disadvantaged groups. She introduces the concept of the advocacy window to explain the discretion members have in ...building their reputations on behalf of the poor, Native Americans, minorities, seniors, immigrants, veterans, women, and the LGBTQ community.
Political Representation: Communities, Ideas and Institutions in Europe (c. 1200 - c. 1690) offers a wide consideration of the nature of representation in the political assemblies of pre-modern ...European, evaluating their creation, evolution, membership and ideological context.
A women's parliamentary caucus works to strengthen the goals of women in a legislative body. It trains female members of the parliament in legislation and facilitates communication among feminists in ...parliament and civil society in pursuing common goals through collective action to enact feminist legislation. Qualitative research in Indonesia over the parliamentary term 2009-2014 has suggested that active communication is vital for the performance of such functions. Poor communication in the study term resulted in an inability to initiate collective action, a mismatched design of capacity-building activity and diminishment of the relationship between feminists in parliament and civil society. The existence of a caucus alone is insufficient. A functioning caucus is essential for substantive representation of women.
Political Representation: Communities, Ideas and Institutions in Europe (c. 1200 - c. 1690), a scholarly collection on representation in medieval and early modern Europe, opens up the field of ...institutional and parliamentary history to new paradigms of representation across a wide geography and chronology - as testified by the volume's studies on assemblies ranging from Burgundy and Brabant to Ireland and Italy. The focus is on three areas: institutional developments of representative institutions in Western Europe; the composition of these institutions concerning interest groups and individual participants; and the ideological environment of representatives in time and space. By analysing the balance between bottom-up and top-down approaches to the functioning of institutions of representation; by studying the actors behind the representative institutions linking prosopographical research with changes in political dialogue; and by exploring the ideological world of representation, this volume makes a key contribution to the historiography of pre-modern government and political culture.Contributors are Marìa Asenjo-González, Wim Blockmans, Mario Damen, Coleman A. Dennehy, Jan Dumolyn, Marco Gentile, David Grummitt, Peter Hoppenbrouwers, Alastair J. Mann, Tim Neu, Ida Nijenhuis, Michael Penman, Graeme Small, Robert Stein and Marie Van Eeckenrode.
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