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This work presents the results of a comprehensive and integrated research project in comparative abortion policy and politics in post‐industrial democracies. It focuses on the questions of state feminism—the extent to which women's policy agencies further goals of women's movements for descriptive and substantive representation. In 11 countries in Western Europe and North America, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and the US, authors analyse the most significant debates on abortion policies from the 1970s through the 1990s. Following a common research design, individual researchers describe how each issue came to the public agenda, the goals of women's movement actors, the effectiveness of movement actors and women's policy agencies in inserting pro‐woman gendered perspectives into the issue frames, and the policy outcomes. They assess the success of the women's movement in gaining both access to the policy subsystem as well as favourable policy content. The comparative conclusion to the book examines several hypotheses in light of the descriptive information in the chapters. Have women's movement been successful in increasing their representation and thus making policy processes more democratic? To what extent have women's policy agencies been allies of movement activists? What explains patterns of movement success? In addition to state feminism theory, the conclusion assesses the explanatory power of theories of resource mobilization and political opportunity structure on women's movement effectiveness.

The central argument of this book is that voting unity in European legislatures is not primarily the result of the ‘disciplining’ power of the leadership of parliamentary parties, but rather the result of a combination of ideological homogeneity through self-selection into political parties and the calculations of individual legislators about their own long-term benefits. Despite the central role of policy preferences in the subsequent behaviour of legislators, preferences at the level of the individual legislator have been almost entirely neglected in the study of parliaments and legislative behaviour. The book measures these using an until now under-utilized resource: parliamentary surveys. Building on these, the book develops measures of policy incentives of legislators to dissent from their parliamentary parties, and show that preference similarity amongst legislators explains a very substantial proportion of party unity, yet alone cannot explain all of it. Analysing the attitudes of legislators to the demands of party unity, and what drives these attitudes, the book argues that what explains the observed unity (beyond what preference similarity would explain) is the conscious acceptance by MPs that the long-term benefits of belonging to a united party (such as increased influence on legislation, lower transaction costs, and better chances of gaining office) outweigh the short-terms benefits of always voting for their ideal policy outcome. The book buttresses this argument through the analysis of both open-ended survey questions as well as survey questions on the costs and benefits of belonging to a political party in a legislature.

Many elections fail. The most overt malpractices used by rulers include imprisoning dissidents, harassing adversaries, coercing voters, vote-rigging counts, and finally, if losing, blatantly disregarding the people's choice. Administrative irregularities are also common, such as inaccurate electoral registers, ballot miscounts, and security defects. Flawed contests have triggered public protests and international criticism. It is time to take stock of these problems. This book addresses three related themes: what standards and evidence determine when elections fail? What strengthens effective, impartial, and independent electoral authorities? And, do failed contests undermine political legitimacy? International experts bring new concepts, theories, and evidence to illuminate these issues, drawing upon a range of cases in established democracies such as Britain and the United States, newer democracies in Central and Latin America, and diverse regimes in Africa and the Middle East. The book illuminates major themes in studies of democracy and democratization, comparative politics, elections and voting behavior, political sociology, international development, public opinion and political behavior, political institutions, and public policy.

In this collection, innovative and eminent social and policy analysts, including Colin Crouch, Anna Coote, Jeremy Gilbert, Grahame Thompson and Ted Benton, challenge the failing but still dominant ideology and policies of neo-liberalism. The book suggests extending and deepening democracy and participation into economic and cultural institutions for greater material and social equality to reinforce established social democratic principles of redistribution and public investment. Updated to assess the Brexit and Trump upsurges, the editors’ synthesis offers a framework for a revitalised social democracy. It links concepts such as Polanyi’s ‘commons’ and Habermas’s ’lifeworld’ to the attempts by social justice, feminist, environmentalist movements to advance equality through democratisation and market accountability to civil society. The lifeworld of voluntary associations, families and communities is proposed as the logical starting point for radical transformation, not in ‘blue-sky’ projects, but in existing alternatives like: community organisations, municipal enterprises, mutual and cooperative societies, social movement organisations, and trade-union branches. As well as the more informal networks in which popular involvement is already shaping solutions to the human needs which neoliberalism frustrates. The collection critically dissects, but goes beyond the ideologies and institutions of neoliberalism. It identifies the agents which could promote an alternative political economy for the UK; one based on local and international models of democratic governance to rival and displace prevailing market and corporate dominance. Its combination of critique, analysis and political engagement could be invaluable for those teaching, studying and campaigning for transformative political, economic and social policies.

There is a growing body of evidence pointing towards rising levels of public dissatisfaction with the formal political process. Depoliticization refers to a more discrete range of contemporary strategies politicians employ that tend to remove or displace the potential for choice, collective agency, and deliberation. This book examines the relationship between these trends of dissatisfaction and displacement, as understood within the broader shift towards governance. It brings together a number of contributions from scholars who have a varied range of concerns but who nevertheless share a common interest in developing the concept of depoliticization through their engagement with a set of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical questions. The contributions in this volume explore these questions from a variety of different perspectives by using a number of different empirical examples and case studies from both within the nation state and from other regional, global, and multilevel arenas. In this context, this volume examines the limits and potential of depoliticization as a concept and its contribution to the larger and more established literatures on governance and anti-politics.

Alexis de Tocqueville published his famous study of the United States at a time when modern democracy was still quite young. His study of democratic institutions in the United States, as well as his comparative reflections on political institutions in France, is based on detailed empirical evidence drawn from long and arduous fieldwork using a variety of textual and oral methods. Tocqueville also relied on theoretical work seeking to draw sustainable formulations belonging to a general comparative order while respecting the historical specificities of each institutional form. Using as its basis Alexis de Tocqueville’s landmark study Democracy in America, this book is a comparative study of democracy in India and the United States. It frames the comparison based on the distinct trajectories of the two countries: the United States moving ‘from equality’ at birth towards new forms of inequality over time, and India moving ‘towards equality’ from an inegalitarian social order at independence. The book discusses the experience of democracy in the two democracies, focusing on the effect of democratization on key elements of public life from religion to citizenship, capitalism, the struggle for equality, and the status of minorities (including the Jews) in the two countries.

This book is premised on the notion that subnational undemocratic regimes (SURs) within countries not only differ among each other but that they maintain different relations with the federal government, which is why they are reproduced differently. The book argues that alternative pathways of SUR continuity result first and foremost from the capacity (or lack thereof) of democratic presidents to wield power over SURs and autocrats. If presidents have the (fiscal or partisan) resources to induce cooperation from subnational autocrats and can thus secure credible and routine political support, the former have strong incentives to invest in the continuity and stability of undemocratic provincial regimes and autocrats. Under these circumstances, SUR reproduction from above takes place. Conversely, if presidents fail to exert effective power and are prevented from disciplining subnational autocrats via fiscal or partisan means, they will implement policies to oppose and weaken SURs. This does not necessarily lead to SUR breakdown. Local variables, such as subnational autocrats’ capacity to ensure party elite unity and/or mass political support, shape autocrats’ ability to counterbalance presidential attempts at destabilization, and also allow autocrats to keep their regimes alive. Where this occurs, SUR self-reproduction takes place. This explanation of SUR continuity is tested in contemporary Argentina and Mexico using a multi-method approach. Both quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as cross-national and within-country comparisons, are employed to test pathways of SUR continuity in two of Latin America’s largest countries.

This book assesses how Muslims and non-Muslims differ—and do not differ—in the contemporary world. Using rigorous methods and data drawn from around the globe, the text reveals that in some areas Muslims and non-Muslims differ less than is commonly imagined. Muslims are not inclined to favor the fusion of religious and political authority or especially prone to mass political violence. Yet there are differences. These include: gender inequality is more severe among Muslims, Muslims are unusually averse to homosexuality and other controversial behaviors, and democracy is rare in the Muslim world. Other areas of divergence bear the marks of a Muslim advantage: Homicide rates and class-based inequities are less severe among Muslims than non-Muslims. The book's findings have vital implications for human welfare, interfaith understanding, and international relations.

This book analyzes the politics of religion in the Arab world after the emergence of new public spheres over the past few decades. By examining those spheres as they really are, rather than measuring them against an ideal of democratic deliberation, the arguments and the spheres within which they are occur are revealed to be lively and increasingly participatory but also polarizing, divisive, and far from egalitarian. While they have grown in force, these spheres are not efficacious, leading to a widening gap between regimes and the societies they govern. Focusing on arguments aired in new and old media, neighborhood discussions, and parliaments, the book probes debates over constitution, family law, and education in depth. It shows how these various forums where arguments take place are increasingly linked, forming not a uniform citizenry but instead a badly divided one. The linkages among the spheres allow a leader’s words to followers to be overheard and then lampooned by opponents. Various groups become more acutely aware of how deeply they differ. As arguments are detached from the authority of the person making them, they spread in ways that can divide as well as persuade. Without a strong political process to forge agreement and reward coalition building, the reborn Arab politics is exciting and vital but also noisy, rough, and often ineffective.

Why does public management—the art of the state—so often go wrong, producing failure and fiasco instead of public service, and what are the different ways in which control or regulation can be applied to government? Why do we find contradictory recipes for the improvement of public services, and are the forces of modernity set to produce worldwide convergence in ways of organizing government? This study aims to explore such questions, which are central to debates over public management. It combines contemporary and historical experience, and employs grid/group cultural theory as an organizing frame and method of exploration. Using examples from different places and eras, the study seeks to identify the recurring variety of ideas about how to organize public services—and contrary to widespread claims that modernization will bring a new global uniformity, it argues that variety is unlikely to disappear from doctrine and practice in public management. The book has three parts. Part I, Introductory, has three chapters that discuss various aspects of public management. Part II, Classic and Recurring Ideas in Public Management, has four chapters that discuss various ways of doing public management. Part III, Rhetoric, Modernity, and Science in Public Management, has three chapters that discuss the rhetoric, and culture of public management, contemporary public management, and the state of the art of the state.

Something remarkable has occurred in Asia with little fanfare over the past twenty-five years. Considered severely underinstitutionalized at the end of the Cold War, Asia’s regional architecture is now characterized by a complex patchwork of overlapping alliances and multilateral institutions. How did this happen? Why should we care? And what does this mean for the future of regional order and Asian security? Adopting a new framework grounded in historical institutionalism, this book examines the transformation of Asia’s regional architecture from 1945 to the present. The book traces institutional and political developments in Asia beginning with the emergence of the postwar US bilateral alliance system and covers the debate and contention behind the rise of several post–Cold War multilateral initiatives. These include the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, ASEAN Regional Forum, East Asian Summit, Trans-Pacific Partnership, China-Japan-Korea Trilateral Summit, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Belt and Road Initiative, among others. Asian policy makers have endeavored to create a set of rules, norms, and institutions to build confidence, facilitate cooperation, improve governance, and ultimately bring peace and order to a region fraught with underlying historical and political tensions. Although Asia’s complex patchwork of institutions may exacerbate regional rivalries, the book demonstrates how overlapping institutions may ultimately bring greater stability to the region.

This book focuses on a previously unexamined phenomenon: how host governments utilize diasporas to advance their foreign policy agendas in mutually beneficial ways. The book advances a four-factor theoretical model to analyze the phenomenon for when this occurs, and it delves into the multiple avenues across which it takes place, in a variety of regimes, and across political, security, and commercial matters, proposing a classification with examples worldwide. It shows how, with the endorsement of the host government, select diaspora groups become spokespersons for a heterogeneous diaspora at large, advancing their interests and those of the host state. The contribution is grounded in research on diaspora and migration, ethnic lobbies, and transnationalism. The eight cases of testing the model include the Lebanese-American diaspora on policy toward Syria and Lebanon under George W. Bush, including UN Security Council Resolution 1559 and the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act; the Iraqi National Congress and the US administration in “selling” the 2003 Iraq war to the US and international public; the two ends of the political spectrum of Cuban-American organizations on Cuba policy under Presidents Carter and Reagan; the Iranian government’s use of Shi’i clerics from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (1982–2003) vis-à-vis Iraq and with Iraqi refugees and prisoners of war. In commercial matters, it includes the multidiaspora International Diaspora Engagement Alliance (IdEA) of the US State Department (2011–) directed at homeland development; and the Brazilian state and Syro-Lebanese members of the Arab-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce since the 1970s, as an intermediary with the Arab League.

Since the early years of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese state has sought to regulate the practice of religion. The institutions it created for that purpose were meant to ensure that religious practice would not happen outside the supervision of the state. Since the 1990s, however, unregistered religious sites have proliferated in China, and those include Protestant house churches. China is said to have more unregistered churches than registered ones. Unregistered churches have, for the most part, deliberately chosen not to register with the State Administration for Religious Affairs, and they have also bypassed a number of other central government regulations on religious activities. Despite the fact that they are illegal, local public security bureaus have tolerated those churches. The book argues that they have done so to contain the influence of Protestantism in Chinese cities. It conceptualizes containment, explains why public security bureaus have contained house churches, and discusses the strategy’s impact on authoritarian regime resilience. Autocracies other than China have similarly contained informal religious groups. The book delves into the Mukhabarat’s containment of jihadi Salafists in post-Zarqawi Jordan, and Anwar al-Sadat’s containment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1970s Egypt.

The post-Cold War world has witnessed the extensive development of regional international organizations world-wide. The realtionship between their membership and democratization remains a topic of intense scholarly debate. This book opens up a new aspect of the debate by examining regional organization as set up by autocracies (e.g. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia, and China)—referring to them as “non-democratic regional organizations.” How do these newly emerged organizations counteract and confront the democratization process in their own member states and beyond their borders? How and why do the political regimes, the economic development and the cultures of their member states impac the foundation and development of these organizations? What influence do these organizations have on migration, trade, conflicts, and democratization? The book addresses these questions by developing a new theory of authoritarian regionalism. Employing quantitative analysis of authoritarian regionalism world-wide and its historical development since the 1950s, as well as analysing case studies of post-Soviet Eurasia, the book argues that authoritarian regionalism is a new phenomenon in world politics and that modern non-democratic organizations differ from their historical predecessors and that their influence has radically increased in terms of geographic scope and intensity in the last few years. As such, authoritarian regionalism is an important addition to studies of comparative regionalism and the international dimension of authoritarianism. From the policy perspective, non-democratic regional organizations pose a challenge for Western actors in promoting democracy around the world.

Mediatic representation has become an integral part of politics and policy. The dominance of incident-oriented media formats has led students of politics and media to fear a trend of ‘dumbing down’: the privileging of style over content. This book takes issue with the ‘dumbing down’ thesis both on theoretical and empirical grounds. In particular it investigates how an authoritative governance is possible in crisis-ridden circumstances in a mediatized environment. Maarten Hajer comes up with a communicative understanding of authority, creating a new basis for an authoritative governance in a world marked by political and institutional fragmentation. Extending his discourse-analytical framework, Hajer uses both discursive and dramaturgical methods to study policy makers in their struggle for authority. Three elaborate case studies provide a wealth of details of the dynamics of authority in today's mediatized polity and the peculiar role of crisis and incidents in this. The message of the book is that in the age of mediatization governance needs to be performed. Hajer illuminates contours of a new authoritative governance that encompass different elements than usually get represented in the media or indeed in textbooks on media studies, public policy, or governance. The book shows new ways to recombine traditional government of standing institutions to notions of network governance. The book thus provides new ideas about authoritative governance which is based on the need to actively create relations with a variety of publics.

For more than a century members of political parties have played a central role in many parliamentary democracies, helping parties to mobilize voters, and visibly linking party leaders with their grassroots supporters. Yet in the twenty-first century, party memberships are shrinking. In response, many parties have been changing both the obligations and the rights of party members. This book investigates the changing status of party membership in nineteen established parliamentary democracies, asking when and why party memberships started falling, and why members have gained new political rights even as their numbers have declined. The examination shows that both supply-side and demand-side forces are encouraging political parties to offer party members more, and more meaningful, opportunities for political participation. These forces also lead parties to offer new and lower-cost modes of affiliation. The resulting changes are producing multi-speed membership parties, ones that offer supporters multiple ways to connect with a party, and that encourage individuals to connect in different ways at different points in the political cycle. This book examines the consequences of these ongoing transformations for political parties, and for the democracies in which they compete.

The global rise of political religion is one of the defining and most puzzling characteristics of current world politics. Since the early 1990s, religious parties have achieved stunning electoral victories around the world. This book investigates religious politics and its implications for contemporary democracy through a comparison of political parties in Israel and Turkey. While the politics of Judaism and Islam are typically seen as outgrowths of oppositionally different beliefs, the author's comparative inquiry shows how limiting this understanding of religious politics can be. Her cross-country and cross-religion analysis develops a unique approach to identifying religious parties' idiosyncratic and shared characteristics without reducing them to simple categories of religious/secular, Judeo-Christian/Islamic, or democratic/antidemocratic. The author shows that religious parties in both Israel and Turkey attract broad coalitions of supporters and skillfully inhabit religious and secular worlds simultaneously. They imbue existing traditional ideas with new political messages, blur conventional political lines and allegiances, offer strategic political choices, and exhibit remarkably similar political views. The book's findings will be especially relevant to those who want to pass beyond rudimentary typologies to better assess religious parties' capacities to undermine and contribute to liberal democracy. The Israeli and Turkish cases open a window to better understanding the complexities of religious parties. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that the characteristics of religious political parties—whether Jewish, Muslim, or yet another religion—can be as striking in their similarities as in their differences.

The 2011 Arab uprisings represented the collapse of old ruling bargains across the Arab world and the manifestation of demands for new premises of rule. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is designed to contextualize the Arab Spring, while the second focuses on individual case studies. Part 1 begins with a chapter that traces the rise and fall of ruling bargains in the Middle East and the growing primacy of only one of the elements of the ruling bargain, namely fear, as the main tool of governance across the Middle East and especially the Arab world, a process which began in the 1960s and 1970s and lasted into the 2000s. Part 2 begins with Nader Hashemi’s analysis of Iran’s 2009 Green Movement, which is not generally considered to be part of the Arab Spring. But the Green Movement did represent a popular, mass-based effort to reformulate the ruling bargain that had evolved under the Iranian Islamic Republic over the preceding thirty years. It then examines Egypt’s Tahrir Square revolution, the region’s monarchies and their resilience to revolution. The book ends by considering Islamist groups, the situation in Syria, and Libya’s future.

This book examines the prospects for advancing reform in Ukraine in the wake of the February 2014 Euromaidan revolution. It examines six crucial areas of reform: identity-memory divides, corruption, constitution, judiciary, patrimonialism and the oligarchs, and the economy. On each of these topics, the book provides one chapter that focuses on Ukraine’s experience and one chapter that examines the issue in the broader context of other international practice. Placing Ukraine in comparative perspective shows that many of the country’s problems are not unique and that other countries have been able to address many of the issues currently confronting Ukraine. The chapters provide an in-depth analysis of Ukraine’s challenges and describe the difficulties Ukrainians will have in overcoming the numerous obstacles to reform. As with the constitution, there are no easy answers, but careful analysis shows that some solutions are better than others. Ultimately, the authors offer a series of reforms that can help Ukraine make the best of a bad situation. The book stresses the need to focus on reforms that might not have immediate effect, but that comparative experience shows can solve fundamental contextual challenges. Finally, the book shows that pressures from outside Ukraine can have a strong positive influence on reform efforts inside the country.