During recent decades, radical right parties have been surging in popularity in many nations, gaining legislative seats, enjoying the legitimacy endowed by ministerial office, and striding the ...corridors of government power. The popularity of leaders such as Le Pen, Haider, and Fortuyn has aroused widespread popular concern and a burgeoning scholarly literature. Despite the interest, little consensus has emerged about the primary factors driving this phenomenon. The puzzle is to explain why radical right parties have advanced in a diverse array of democracies - including in Austria, Canada, Norway, France, Italy, New Zealand, Switzerland, Israel, Romania, Russia, and Chile - while failing to make comparable gains in similar societies elsewhere, such as in Sweden, Britain, and the United States. This book, first published in 2005, expands our understanding of support for radical right parties through presenting an integrated new theory which is then tested systematically using a wealth of cross-national survey evidence covering almost forty countries.
Examines changes in political & economic goals, religious norms, & family values & how these changes influence politics & economics drawing on the 1981 & 1990 World Values Surveys & 1970s-1990s ...Eurobarometer surveys (total N = 43 countries). It is argued that economic development, cultural change, & political change vary together in predictable patterns; ie, as societies enter into economic modernization, political & cultural changes are likely to follow. Among these changes are a decrease in gender differences & an expansion of democracy. Further, societies in the modernization phase are likely to value materialistic motivations as they seek to break the cultural constraints on accumulation. However, these changes are not simply linear. Rather, evidence indicates that the most modern of societies are passing from a modern to a postmodern period, a shift caused by the diminishing marginal utility of economic determinism. It is marked by a declining emphasis on functional rationality & materialism & a stress on self-expression & quality of life. Rather than seeking greater accumulation of wealth, postmodern societies value economic security & a broad choice of lifestyles. Postmodern values are also associated with declining confidence in religion, respect for authority, & participation in traditional forms of politics. This situation will evolve as political systems adapt to the new circumstances. Currently, the form of that political response is unclear. The text contains an Introduction & 11 Chpts with Notes. 22 Tables, 70 Figures, 5 Appendixes, 318 References. D. Ryfe
In this book, Carol Mershon and Olga Shvetsova explore one of the central questions in democratic politics: how much autonomy do elected politicians have to shape and reshape the party system on ...their own, without the direct involvement of voters in elections? Mershon and Shvetsova's theory focuses on the choices of party membership made by legislators while serving in office. It identifies the inducements and impediments to legislators' changes of partisan affiliation, and integrates strategic and institutional approaches to the study of parties and party systems. With empirical analyses comparing nine countries that differ in electoral laws, territorial governance and executive-legislative relations, Mershon and Shvetsova find that strategic incumbents have the capacity to reconfigure the party system as established in elections. Representatives are motivated to bring about change by opportunities arising during the parliamentary term, and are deterred from doing so by the elemental democratic practice of elections.
Food Waste is the first academic study to tackle this highly topical subject. Drawing from social science approaches to waste, material culture and everyday life in the home, the author uncovers the ...reasons behind the vast quantity of food wasted on a daily basis by households and consumers.
This book provides a framework for analyzing the impact of the separation of powers on party politics. Conventional political science wisdom assumes that democracy is impossible without political ...parties, because parties fulfil all the key functions of democratic governance. They nominate candidates, coordinate campaigns, aggregate interests, formulate and implement policy, and manage government power. When scholars first asserted the essential connection between parties and democracy, most of the world's democracies were parliamentary. Yet by the dawn of the twenty-first century, most democracies had directly elected presidents. David J. Samuels and Matthew S. Shugart provide a theoretical framework for analyzing variation in the relationships among presidents, parties, and prime ministers across the world's democracies, revealing the important ways that the separation of powers alters party organization and behavior - thereby changing the nature of democratic representation and accountability.
Shows that the politics of democratic societies is moving towards a presidentialized working mode, even in the absence of formal institutional changes. These developments can be explained by a ...combination of long-term structural changes in modern politics and societies’ contingent factors that fluctuate over time. While these contingent, short-term factors relate to the personalities of office holders, the overall political agenda, and the majority situation in parliament, there are several structural factors that are relatively uniform across modern nations. First, the internationalization of modern politics (which is particularly pronounced within the European Union) has led to an ‘executive bias’ of the political process that has strengthened the role of political top elites vis-à-vis their parliamentary groups and/or their parties. Their predominance has been amplified further by the vastly expanded steering capacities of state machineries, which have severely reduced the scope of effective parliamentary control. At the same time, the declining stability of political alignments has increased the proportion of citizens whose voting decisions are not constrained by long-standing party loyalties. In conjunction with the mediatization of politics, this has increased the capacity of political leaders to bypass their party machines and to appeal directly to voters.As a result, three interrelated processes have led to a political process increasingly moulded by the inherent logic of presidentialism: increasing leadership power and autonomy within the political executive; increasing leadership power and autonomy within political parties; and increasingly leadership-centered electoral processes.The book presents evidence for this process of presidentialization for 14 modern democracies (including the USA and Canada). While there are substantial cross-national differences, the overall thesis holds: modern democracies are increasingly following a presidential logic of governance through which leadership is becoming more central and more powerful, but also increasingly dependent on successful immediate appeal to the mass public. Implications for democratic theory are considered.
This book asks why some countries devote the lion's share of their social policy resources to the elderly, while others have a more balanced repertoire of social spending. Far from being the outcome ...of demands for welfare spending by powerful age-based groups in society, the 'age' of welfare is an unintended consequence of the way that social programs are set up. The way that politicians use welfare state spending to compete for votes, along either programmatic or particularistic lines, locks these early institutional choices into place. So while society is changing - aging, divorcing, moving in and out of the labor force over the life course in new ways - social policies do not evolve to catch up. The result, in occupational welfare states like Italy, the United States, and Japan, is social spending that favors the elderly and leaves working-aged adults and children largely to fend for themselves.
University rankings have gained popularity around the world, and are now a significant factor shaping reputation. This book is the first comprehensive study of rankings from a global perspective, ...making an important contribution to our understanding of the rankings phenomenon. (Contains 17 figures, 17 tables and 4 illustrations.)
One fifth of the population of the United States belongs to the immigrant or second generations. While the US is generally thought of as the immigrant society par excellence, it now has a number of ...rivals in Europe.The Next Generationbrings together studies from top immigration scholars to explore how the integration of immigrants affects the generations that come after. The original essays explore the early beginnings of the second generation in the United States and Western Europe, exploring the overall patterns of success of the second generation.
While there are many striking similarities in the situations of the children of labor immigrants coming from outside the highly developed worlds of Europe and North America, wherever one looks, subtle features of national and local contexts interact with characteristics of the immigrant groups themselves to create variations in second-generation trajectories. The contributors show that these issues are of the utmost importance for the future, for they will determine the degree to which contemporary immigration will produce either durable ethno-racial cleavages or mainstream integration.
Contributors: Dalia Abdel-Hady, Frank D. Bean, Susan K. Brown, Maurice Crul, Nancy A. Denton, Rosita Fibbi, Nancy Foner, Anthony F. Heath, Donald J. Hernandez, Tariqul Islam, Frank Kalter, Philip Kasinitz, Mark A. Leach, Mathias Lerch, Suzanne E. Macartney, Karen G Marotz, Noriko Matsumoto, Tariq Modood, Joel Perlmann, Karen Phalet, Jeffrey G. Reitz, Rubén G. Rumbaut, Roxanne Silberman, Philippe Wanner, Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida, andYe Zhang.
Negotiating Demandsis an original and thought-provoking study that not only advances our knowledge of police organization and decision-making strategies but also refines our understanding of how ...processes of social inclusion and exclusion occur in different liberal regimes and how they can be addressed.
