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Publisher Description
All political parties need funding to play their part in the political process, yet the role of money in politics is arguably the biggest threat to democracy today. This global threat knows no boundaries, and is evident across all continents from huge corporate campaign donations in the United States and drug money seeping into politics in Latin America, to corruption scandals throughout Asia and Europe. Attempts to tackle these challenges through political finance laws and regulations are often undermined by a lack of political will or capacity, as well as poorly designed and enforced measures. This Handbook addresses the problems of money in politics by analysing political finance regulati...
Networks of Distrust: The Impact of Automation, Corruption, and Media on Philippine Elections discusses how in a Philippine context, the bureaucracy and the Commission on Elections is dysfunctional and that corruption has a ubiquitous impact on governance and administration that has defined how the state operates. Scholars and commentators have described Philippine democracy as a paradox. This book uses the unprecedented May 2010 synchronized automation of elections — an attempt at electoral engineering — to better understand the lingering paradox of Philippine politics and its public administration system.
In recent decades, governments and NGOs--in an effort to promote democracy, freedom, fairness, and stability throughout the world--have organized teams of observers to monitor elections in a variety of countries. But when more organizations join the practice without uniform standards, are assessments reliable? When politicians nonetheless cheat and monitors must return to countries even after two decades of engagement, what is accomplished? Monitoring Democracy argues that the practice of international election monitoring is broken, but still worth fixing. By analyzing the evolving interaction between domestic and international politics, Judith Kelley refutes prevailing arguments that intern...
This book offers new perspectives on transnational activism with a focus on Asia. The chapters and case studies examine macro and micro aspects of power and how cross-border activities of civil society groups relate to problems of democracy.
In 2014, after a decade of political turmoil, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) carried out Thailand's 13th coup since the country's transformation from absolute to constitutional monarchy in 1932. Though the NCPO promised to restore the rule of law, justice—long tenuous in Thailand—disappeared entirely. The legal system was used to criminalize the thoughts and actions of democratic dissidents, facilitate extrajudicial violence, and guarantee impunity for the coup and crimes by state officials. Combining legal and historical scholarship and long-term courtroom observation, Dictatorship on Trial traces the legal, social, and political impacts of authoritarianism, and foregro...
This Pivot explores the mechanism of election manipulation in ostensibly democratic but essentially authoritarian systems called the hybrid regime, using the 2018 parliamentary elections in Bangladesh as an example. The 2018 election has delivered an unprecedented victory to the incumbent Bangladesh Awami League. Elections pose serious dilemmas for the leaders of hybrid regimes. While contested elections bolster their claims of democracy and augment their legitimacy, they can also threaten the status quo. Faced with the challenge, the incumbents tend to hold stage-managed elections. This book offers incisive examination of Bangladesh’s political environment, rigorous scrutiny of the roles of state institutions including the law enforcing agencies, and meticulous analysis of election results. It also fills in a gap in the extant hybrid regime literature which seldom explores the strategies of engineered elections.
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Public sector decentralization has emerged prominently in many Asian and Latin American countries as a strategy to promote development and political reform. Results in both cases have been mixed. Despite broad similarities in intent and outcome, contextual differences between the regions have led to striking differences in the way decentralization has been structured and implemented. This volume takes an atypically historical and interdisciplinary perspective on decentralization, highlighting how fiscal and political forces together have been shaping its evolution in the two regions.
Recent decades have seen growing concern regarding problems of electoral integrity. The most overt malpractices used by rulers include imprisoning dissidents, harassing adversaries, coercing voters, vote-rigging counts, and even blatant disregard for the popular vote. Elsewhere minor irregularities are common, exemplified by inaccurate voter registers, maladministration of polling facilities, lack of security in absentee ballots, pro-government media bias, ballot miscounts, and gerrymandering. Serious violations of human rights that undermine electoral credibility are widely condemned by domestic observers and the international community. Recent protests about integrity have mobilized in cou...