Download Democracy Accountability And Representation full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online free Democracy Accountability And Representation ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
| Author | : Adam Przeworski |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 368 |
| Release | : 1999-09-13 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 9780521646161 |
6 Party Government and Responsiveness: James A. Stimson
| Author | : Adam Przeworski |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 364 |
| Release | : 1999-09-13 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 9780521641531 |
This book examines whether mechanisms of accountability characteristic of democratic systems are sufficient to induce the representatives to act in the best interest of the represented. The first part of the volume focuses on the role of elections, distinguishing different ways in which they may cause representation. The second part is devoted to the role of checks and balances, between the government and the parliament as well as between the government and the bureaucracy. Overall, the essays combine theoretical discussions, game-theoretic models, case studies, and statistical analyses, within a shared analytical approach and a standardized terminology. The empirical material is drawn from the well established democracies as well as from new democracies.
| Author | : Jacques Thomassen |
| Publisher | : OUP Oxford |
| Total Pages | : 301 |
| Release | : 2014-07-03 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 0191025631 |
Elections and Democracy addresses the contrast between two different views on representative democracy. According to the first view elections are a mechanism to hold government accountable. In the second view elections are primarily a means to ensure that citizens' views and interests are properly represented in the democratic process. The majoritarian and consensus models of democracy are the embodiment in institutional structures of these two different views of democracy. In the majoritarian view the single most important function of an election is the selection of a government. The concentration of power in the hands of an elected majority government makes it accountable to the people. In consensus models of democracy, or proportional systems, the major function of elections is to elect the members of parliament who together should be as representative as possible of the electorate as a whole. The criterion for the democratic quality of the system is how representative parliament really is. The book explores how far these different views and their embodiment in institutional structures influence vote choice, political participation and satisfaction with the functioning of democracy. The volume is based on data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), a comparative study across 36 countries. The general conclusion of the book is that formal political institutions are less relevant for people's attitudes and behavior than often presumed. Rather than formal political institutions like the electoral system it seems to be characteristics of the party system like polarization and the clarity of responsibility that really matter. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a collaborative program of research among election study teams from around the world. Participating countries include a common module of survey questions in their post-election studies. The resulting data are deposited along with voting, demographic, district, and macro variables. The studies are then merged into a single, free, public dataset for use in comparative study and cross-level analysis. The set of volumes in this series is based on these CSES modules, and the volumes address the key theoretical issues and empirical debates in the study of elections and representative democracy. Some of the volumes will be organized around the theoretical issues raised by a particular module, while others will be thematic in their focus. Taken together, these volumes will provide a rigorous and ongoing contribution to understanding the expansion and consolidation of democracy in the twenty-first century. Series editors: Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Ian McAllister
| Author | : Justin Grimmer |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 221 |
| Release | : 2014-11-23 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 1400852668 |
Constituents often fail to hold their representatives accountable for federal spending decisions—even though those very choices have a pervasive influence on American life. Why does this happen? Breaking new ground in the study of representation, The Impression of Influence demonstrates how legislators skillfully inform constituents with strategic communication and how this facilitates or undermines accountability. Using a massive collection of Congressional texts and innovative experiments and methods, the book shows how legislators create an impression of influence through credit claiming messages. Anticipating constituents' reactions, legislators claim credit for programs that elicit a positive response, making constituents believe their legislator is effectively representing their district. This spurs legislators to create and defend projects popular with their constituents. Yet legislators claim credit for much more—they announce projects long before they begin, deceptively imply they deserve credit for expenditures they had little role in securing, and boast about minuscule projects. Unfortunately, legislators get away with seeking credit broadly because constituents evaluate the actions that are reported, rather than the size of the expenditures. The Impression of Influence raises critical questions about how citizens hold their political representatives accountable and when deception is allowable in a democracy.
| Author | : Jack H. Nagel |
| Publisher | : University of Pennsylvania Press |
| Total Pages | : 348 |
| Release | : 2013-07-03 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 081220817X |
In any democracy, the central problem of governance is how to inform, organize, and represent the opinions of the public in order to advance three goals: popular control over leaders, equality among citizens, and competent governance. In most political analyses, voting is emphasized as the central and essential process in achieving these goals. Yet democratic representation encompasses a great deal more than voter beliefs and behavior and, indeed, involves much more than the machinery of elections. Democracy requires government agencies that respond to voter decisions, a civil society in which powerful organized interests do not dominate all others, and communication systems that permit divergent voices to be heard. Representation: Elections and Beyond brings together leading international scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the twenty-first-century innovations—in voting laws and practices, in electoral systems, in administrative, political, and civil organizations, and in communication processes and new technologies—that are altering how we understand democratic representation. Featuring twelve essays that engage with national, provincial, and municipal governments across three continents, this volume tackles traditional core elements of democratic representation, such as voting, electoral systems, and political parties, while also underscoring the ways in which beliefs and preferences of citizens are influenced, expressed, and aggregated and the effects of those methods and practices on political agendas and policy outcomes. In pinpointing deficiencies in contemporary democratic practices and possibilities for reform, Representation provides an invaluable roadmap to improve democratic representation in the twenty-first century. Contributors: André Blais, Pradeep Chhibber, Archon Fung, Jacob Hacker, Zoltan Hajnal, Matthew Hindman, David Karpf, Georgia Kernell, Alexander Keyssar, Anthony McGann, Susan Ostermann, Paul Pierson, Dennis Thompson, Jessica Trounstine, Mark E. Warren.
| Author | : Leif Lewin |
| Publisher | : Harvard University Press |
| Total Pages | : 264 |
| Release | : 2007-03-15 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 9780674024755 |
It is common for political leaders to claim they have no control over bad outcomes. Indeed, they often cite the arguments of political theorists and public intellectuals as to why: history rushes onward oblivious of human will; force and violence overcome political aims; globalization undermines the actions of national leaders; the bureaucracy sabotages their intentions; bad outcomes are often the unintended result of actions. In Democratic Accountability, Leif Lewin examines these reasons and argues that they are unconvincing. He makes his case by describing and analyzing counterexamples in seven cases, including the prevention of a communist takeover in Europe after World War II, the European Union's preventing another European war, and Margaret Thatcher's taming of the bureaucracy in Britain. In a staunch defense of the possibility for meaningful and profound democratic decision making, Lewin finds that, in fact, not only do political leaders exert a good measure of control and therefore can be assigned responsibility, but the meaning of the functioning democracy is that the people hold their leaders accountable.
| Author | : Robert A. Dahl |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 569 |
| Release | : 2003-08-15 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 0262541475 |
The Democracy Sourcebook offers a collection of classic writings and contemporary scholarship on democracy, creating a book that can be used by undergraduate and graduate students in a wide variety of courses, including American politics, international relations, comparative politics, and political philosophy. The editors have chosen substantial excerpts from the essential theorists of the past, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the authors of The Federalist Papers; they place them side by side with the work of such influential modern scholars as Joseph Schumpeter, Adam Przeworski, Seymour Martin Lipset, Samuel P. Huntington, Ronald Dworkin, and Amartya Sen. The book is divided into nine self-contained chapters: "Defining Democracy," which discusses procedural, deliberative, and substantive democracy; "Sources of Democracy," on why democracy exists in some countries and not in others; "Democracy, Culture, and Society," about cultural and sociological preconditions for democracy; "Democracy and Constitutionalism," which focuses on the importance of independent courts and a bill of rights; "Presidentialism versus Parliamentarianism"; "Representation," discussing which is the fairest system of democratic accountability; "Interest Groups"; "Democracy's Effects," an examination of the effect of democracy on economic growth and social inequality; and finally, "Democracy and the Global Order" discusses the effects of democracy on international relations, including the propensity for war and the erosion of national sovereignty by transnational forces.
| Author | : Craig T. Borowiak |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 272 |
| Release | : 2011-10-07 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 0190208678 |
Few political concepts are as emblematic of our era as democratic accountability. In a time of political and economic turmoil, in which global forces have destabilized conventional relations of political authority, democratic accountability has come to symbolize both what is absent and what is desired in our polity. Situated at the intersection of democratic theory and international studies, Accountability and Democracy provides an in-depth critical analysis of accountability. Through an engagement with several key democratic traditions, both ancient and modern, the book paints a rich picture of democratic accountability as a multi-dimensional concept harboring competing imperatives and diverse instantiations. Contrary to dominant views that emphasize discipline and control, Craig Borowiak offers an original and refreshing view of democratic accountability as a source of mutuality, participation, and political transformation. He both creatively engages conventional electoral models of accountability and moves beyond them by situating democratic accountability within more deliberative, participatory and agonistic contexts. Provocatively, the book also challenges deep-seated understandings of democratic accountability as an expression of popular sovereignty. Borowiak instead argues that accountable governance is incompatible with all claims to ultimate authority, regardless of whether they refer to the demos, the state, or cosmopolitan public law. Rather than conceiving of democratic accountability as a way to legitimize a secure and sovereign political order, the book contends that destabilization and democratic insurgence are indispensable and often neglected facets of democratic accountability practices. For contemporary scholars, practitioners and activists grappling with the challenge of building democratic legitimacy into world politics, the book urges greater reflexivity and nuance in how democratic accountability is evoked and implemented. It offers insights into the myriad ways democratic accountability has been thwarted in the past, while also cultivating a sense of expanded possibility for how it might be conceived for the present.
| Author | : Sooh-Rhee Ryu |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 177 |
| Release | : 2009 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : |
In modern democratic theories, the simple premise of government representation suggests two major functions of a representative democracy--government responsiveness and accountability. Not only do we expect democratic governments to initiate policies that reflect the campaign promises they make during elections, we also expect them to successfully perform during their term in office. While the process of responding to public policy preferences connects citizens and their elected representatives directly through the idea of policy responsiveness, citizens also have the ability to hold elected officials accountable for their policy actions. Both functions of policy responsiveness and electoral accountability contain the notion of democratic representation -in which citizens and their representatives interact with each other to fulfill the ideal of democratic representation.^The extant literature regarding democratic representation rarely combines both functions within a single conceptual framework. My dissertation assesses both responsiveness and accountability and presents a theory that illustrates and explains the function of representation in new democracies. An empirical focus on new democracies extends the applicability of democratic theories and broadens our understanding of democratic practices beyond advanced democracies to the developed world. My analysis is three-fold: Firstly, I explore the varying degree of policy responsiveness by assessing the promise-to-policy congruence of incumbent governments. Secondly, I determine the relative correlates of responsiveness by empirically testing extant propositions from the literature. Thirdly, I assess the extent of accountability that occurs based upon both campaign promises and performance and investigate the voting behavior of citizens in new democracies.^Using an original dataset of twenty six Third Wave democracies, my research finds that incumbent governments in new democracies do act responsively upon campaign promises. Additionally, I find that the conventional theory of electoral competition - enhancing responsiveness does not hold true in new democracies. Regarding government accountability, citizens in new democracies do not seem to care about economic policy promises. This is largely due to the time-specific context of neo-liberalism in new democracies' economic policies, in which incumbent governments were forced to abandon campaign promises under the pressure of the global market. However, in the social and health policy area, evidence of accountability based upon both promises and performance indicates that citizens in new democracies can promote representative governments by holding elected officials accountable for their policy actions.^Overall, I conclude that governments in new democracies do represent the policy preferences of their citizens by responding to the campaign promises and by being held accountable for their promises and performance, especially in the social and health policy area. These findings are positive indicators for the quality of democracy in such countries as my research suggests a relatively solid connection between the citizens and their representatives.
| Author | : José María Maravall |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 287 |
| Release | : 2008 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 0521884101 |
How much influence do citizens have to control the government? What guides voters at election time? Why do governments survive? How do institutions modify the power of the people over politicians? The book combines academic analytical rigor with comparative analysis to identify how much information voters must have to select a politician for office, or for holding a government accountable; whether parties in power can help voters to control their governments; how different institutional arrangements influence voters' control; why politicians choose particular electoral systems; and what economic and social conditions may undermine not only governments, but democracy. Arguments are backed by vast macro and micro empirical evidence. There are cross-country comparisons and survey analyses of many countries. In every case there has been an attempt to integrate analytical arguments and empirical research. The goal is to shed new light on perplexing questions of positive democratic theory.
