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.
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.
Presidents, Parties, and Prime Ministers Samuels, David J.; Shugart, Matthew S.
Presidents, parties, and prime ministers: how the separation of powers affects party organization and behavior,
05/2010
eBook
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.
Places of Pain and Shame Logan, William; Reeves, Keir
2009, 20081205, 2008-12-05, Letnik:
3
eBook
Places of Pain and Shame is a cross-cultural study of sites that represent painful and/or shameful episodes in a national or local community’s history, and the ways that government agencies, heritage ...professionals and the communities themselves seek to remember, commemorate and conserve these cases – or, conversely, choose to forget them.
Such episodes and locations include: massacre and genocide sites, places related to prisoners of war, civil and political prisons, and places of ‘benevolent’ internment such as leper colonies and lunatic asylums. These sites bring shame upon us now for the cruelty and futility of the events that occurred within them and the ideologies they represented. They are however increasingly being regarded as ‘heritage sites’, a far cry from the view of heritage that prevailed a generation ago when we were almost entirely concerned with protecting the great and beautiful creations of the past, reflections of the creative genius of humanity rather than the reverse – the destructive and cruel side of history.
Why has this shift occurred, and what implications does it have for professionals practicing in the heritage field? In what ways is this a ‘difficult’ heritage to deal with? This volume brings together academics and practitioners to explore these questions, covering not only some of the practical matters, but also the theoretical and conceptual issues, and uses case studies of historic places, museums and memorials from around the globe, including the United States, Northern Ireland, Poland, South Africa, China, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Timor and Australia.
1. Remembering Places of Pain and Shame 2. Let the Dead be Remembered: Interpretation of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial 3. The Hiroshima "Peace Memorial": Transforming Legacy, Memories and Landscapes 4. Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Challenges of Heritage Management Following the Cold War 5. "Dig a Hole and Bury the Past in It": Reconciliation and the Heritage of Genocide in Cambodia 6. The Myall Creek Memorial: History, Identity and Reconciliation 7. Cowra Japanese War Cemetry 8. A Cave in Taiwan: Comfort Women's Memories and the Local Identity 9. Postcolonial Shame: Heritage and the Forgotten Pain of Civilian Women Internees in Java 10. Difficult Memories: The Independence Struggle as Cultural Heritage in East Timor 11. Port Arthur, Norfolk Island, New Caledonia: Convict Prison Islands in the Antipodes 12. Hoa Lo Museum, Hanoi: Changing Attitudes to a Vietnamese Place of Pain and Shame 13. Places of Pain as Tools for Social Justice in the "New" South Africa: Black Heritage Preservation in the "Rainbow" Nation's Townships 14. Negotiating Places of Pain in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland: Debating the Future of the Maze/Prison/Long Kesh 15. Beauty Springing from the Breast of Pain . "No Less than a Palace: Kew Asylum, its Planned Surrounds, and its Present-Day Residents 17. Between the Hostel and the Detention Centre: Possible Trajectories of Migrant Pain and Shame in Australia
"William Logan and Keir Reeves are to be congratulated for putting together an outstanding collection of essays that critically evaluate the potentials and pitfalls of different sites of 'difficult heritage.' ... Importantly, these papers consistently strike the right tone between rigorous intellectual inquiry and respectful dialogue. The authors all seem acutely aware that these sites should not just be academic playthings but are vital to people’s sense of personhood, history, and justice." - Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Current Anthropology , Volume 51, Number 3, June 2010
“This is an interesting and courageous book that explores a challenging and fascinating subject through many significant political and cultural sites. It makes an important contribution to, what is at least in Australia, a modest body of literature that critically engages with and examines heritage theory and practice and connects it with the constant work of communities and nations in trying to imagine, define and cohere identity.” - Peter Romey and Sharon Veale
Early Learning and Development provides a unique synthesis of cultural-historical theory from Vygotsky, Elkonin and Leontiev in the twentieth century to the ground-breaking research of scholars such ...as Siraj-Blatchford, Kratsova and Hedegaard today. It demonstrates how development and learning are culturally embedded and institutionally defined, and it reflects specifically upon the implications for the early childhood profession. Divided into parts, with succinct chapters that build upon knowledge progressively, the everyday lives of children at home, in the community, at pre-school and at school are discussed in the context of child development and pedagogy. The book explicitly problematises the foundations of early childhood education, inviting postgraduates, researchers and academics to drill down into specific areas of international discourse, and extending upper-level undergraduates beyond the fundamental underpinnings of their learning. Ultimately Early Learning and Development offers new models of 'conceptual play' practice and theory within a globally resonant, cultural-historical framework.
In this timely examination of children of immigrants in New York and London, Natasha Kumar Warikoo asks, Is there a link between rap/hip-hop-influenced youth culture and motivation to succeed in ...school? Warikoo challenges teachers, administrators, and parents to look beneath the outward manifestations of youth culture -- the clothing, music, and tough talk -- to better understand the internal struggle faced by many minority students as they try to fit in with peers while working to lay the groundwork for successful lives. Using ethnographic, survey, and interview data in two racially diverse, low-achieving high schools, Warikoo analyzes seemingly oppositional styles, tastes in music, and school behaviors and finds that most teens try to find a balance between success with peers and success in school.
Sport has changed. Traditions and territorial distinctions are dissolving as a result of new global, political, economic and cultural conditions. The team of authors examine these changes, ...investigating the power relations that govern the new global sport and assessing the consequences for the future of sport.
The book is founded on a series of case studies, linked by a common process-sociological approach, and is divided into four sections - each dealing with an important aspect of sport and globalization:
* the local-global nexus - how global sports processes are played out at the level of local communities * lived experiences - the reality of global sport for players and supporters * identity politics - the impact of global sport on national consciousness * sporting futures - the emergent political, economic and cultural forces that are shaping global sport, and their implications for its development.
The text introduces new approaches to the study of sport and globalization, updating and extending Maguire's previous work, and is therefore an essential resource for all those working in this fast-changing area.
Joseph Maguire is Professor of Sociology of Sport and Co-Director of the Centre for Olympic Studies & Research at Loughborough University, UK, as well as Past President of the International Sociology of Sport Association (1995-2003). Joseph Maguire has written extensively in the area of globalisation, sport, culture and society.
1. Local - Global Nexus. 2. Lived Experiences. 3. Identity Politics. 4. Sporting Futures.
