Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Clients and Constituents
Scholars of distributive politics often emphasize partisanship and clientelism. However, as Jennifer Bussell demonstrates in Clients and Constituents, legislators in "patronage democracies" also provide substantial constituency service: non-contingent, direct assistance to individual citizens. Bussell shows how the uneven character of access to services at the local level-often due to biased allocation on the part of local intermediaries-generates demand for help from higher-level officials. The nature of these appeals in turn provides incentives for politicians to help their constituents obtain public benefits. Drawing on a new cross-national dataset and extensive evidence from India-including sustained qualitative shadowing of politicians, novel elite and citizen surveys, and an experimental audit study with a near census of Indian state and national legislators-this book provides a theoretical and empirical examination of political responsiveness in developing countries. It highlights the potential for an under-appreciated form of democratic accountability, one that is however rooted in the character of patronage-based politics.
Corruption and Reform in India
This book asks why some governments improve public services more effectively than others. Through the investigation of a new era of administrative reform, in which digital technologies may be used to facilitate citizens' access to the state, Jennifer Bussell's analysis provides unanticipated insights into this fundamental question. In contrast to factors such as economic development or electoral competition, this study highlights the importance of access to rents, which can dramatically shape the opportunities and threats of reform to political elites. Drawing on a sub-national analysis of twenty Indian states, a field experiment, statistical modeling, case studies, interviews of citizens, bureaucrats, and politicians, and comparative data from South Africa and Brazil, Bussell shows that the extent to which politicians rely on income from petty and grand corruption is closely linked to variation in the timing, management, and comprehensiveness of reforms. The book also illuminates the importance of electoral constituencies and coalition politics in shaping policy outcomes.
Corruption and Reform in India
This book asks why some governments improve public services more effectively than others. Through the investigation of a new era of administrative reform, in which digital technologies may be used to facilitate citizens' access to the state, Jennifer Bussell's analysis provides unanticipated insights into this fundamental question. In contrast to factors such as economic development or electoral competition, this study highlights the importance of access to rents, which can dramatically shape the opportunities and threats of reform to political elites. Drawing on a sub-national analysis of twenty Indian states, a field experiment, statistical modeling, case studies, interviews of citizens, bureaucrats, and politicians, and comparative data from South Africa and Brazil, Bussell shows that the extent to which politicians rely on income from petty and grand corruption is closely linked to variation in the timing, management, and comprehensiveness of reforms. The book also illuminates the importance of electoral constituencies and coalition politics in shaping policy outcomes.
Greed, Corruption, and the Modern State
What makes the control of corruption so difficult and contested? Drawing on the insights of political science, economics and law, the expert contributors to this book offer diverse perspectives. One group of chapters explores the nature of corruption in democracies and autocracies, and “reforms” that are mere facades. Other contributions examine corruption in infrastructure, tax collection, cross-border trade, and military procurement. Case studies from various regions – such as China, Peru, South Africa and New York City – anchor the analysis with real-world situations. The book pays particular attention to corruption involving international business and the domestic regulation of foreign bribery.
Women, Power, and Property
Quotas for women in government have swept the globe. Yet we know little about their capacity to upend entrenched social, political, and economic hierarchies. Women, Power, and Property explores this question within the context of India, the world's largest democracy. Brul employs a research design that maximizes causal inference alongside extensive field research to explain the relationship between political representation, backlash, and economic empowerment. Her findings show that women in government - gatekeepers - catalyze access to fundamental economic rights to property. Women in politics have the power to support constituent rights at critical junctures, such as marriage negotiations, when they can strike integrative solutions to intrahousehold bargaining. Yet there is a paradox: quotas are essential for enforcement of rights, but they generate backlash against women who gain rights without bargaining leverage. In this groundbreaking study, Brul shows how well-designed quotas can operate as a crucial tool to foster equality and benefit the women they are meant to empower.
Farewell to Arms
How, in the absence of institutional mechanisms, do Maoist rebels in India quit an ongoing insurgency without getting killed?How do rebels give up arms and return to the same political processes that they had once sought to overthrow? The question of weaning rebels away from extremist groups is highly significant in counterinsurgency and in the pacification of insurgencies. In Farewell to Arms, Rumela Sen goes to the rebels themselves and breaks down the protracted process of rebel retirement into a multi-staged journey as the rebels see it. She draws on several rounds of interviews with current and former Maoist rebels as well as security personnel, administrators, activists, politicians, a...
Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture
(An) admirable collection. . For anyone interested in what Wogan-Browne calls "the historiography of female community", nuns' libraries and literacy, and Barking abbey itself, this first-class collection of essays is essential reading. CATHOLIC HISTORICAL REVIEW Essays on the texts produced at Barking Abbey - one of the most important centres for writings in the Middle Ages.
Cultivating Democracy
An ethnographic study of Indian democracy that shows how agrarian life creates values of citizenship and active engagement that are essential for the cultivation of democracy.Cultivating Democracy provides a compelling ethnographic analysis of the relationship between formal political institutions and everyday citizenship in rural India. Banerjee draws on deep engagement with the people and social life in two West Bengal villages from 1998-2013, during election campaigns and in the times between, to show how the micro-politics of their day-to-day life builds active engagement with the macro-politics of state and nation. Her sensitive analysis focuses on several "events" in the life of the vi...
The Migration-Development Regime
A sweeping history of how India has used its poor and elite emigrants to further Indian development and how Indian emigrants have reacted, resisted, and re-shaped India's development in response. How can states and migrants themselves explain the causes and effects of global migration? The Migration-Development Regime introduces a novel analytical framework to help answer this question in India, the world's largest emigrant exporter and the world's largest remittance-receiving country. Drawing on an archival analysis of Indian government documents, an original data base of Indian migrants' transnational organizations, and over 200 interviews with poor and elite Indian emigrants, recruiters, ...
House of the People
While there is overwhelming support for democracy in India and voter turnout is higher than in many Western democracies, there are low levels of trust in political parties and elected representatives. This book is an attempt to look beyond Indian elections, which has increasingly occupied analysts and commentators. It focuses on the Lok Sabha (The House of the People), comprising 543 members directly elected for five years by a potential 800 million plus voters in 2019. The book seeks to answer two questions: Is the Indian Parliament, which has the unenviable task of representing a diverse nation of a billion-plus people, working, if not in an exemplary manner, at least reasonably well, to articulate the diverse demands of the electorate and translate them into legislation and policy? To what extent has the practice of Indian democracy transformed the institution of parliament, which was adopted from the British, and its functioning?
