The Art of Political Warfare
Drawing parallels between war and politics, the author explains why military principles can be applied to an understanding of the events, concepts, concerns, issues, and practices of political life.
Drawing parallels between war and politics, the author explains why military principles can be applied to an understanding of the events, concepts, concerns, issues, and practices of political life.
Analyzing the electoral systems of various countries, including those of developing nations, this work examines the relationship between democratic theory values and the electoral institutions used to achieve them. Empirical data is used to find the institutions most appropriate to each model.
Brian Frederick uses empirical data to scrutinize whether representation has been diminished by keeping a ceiling on the number of seats available in the House and argues that now is the time for the House to be increased in order to better represent a rapidly growing country.
CD-ROM contains: Four Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and interactive mapping exercises, some of which extend the scholarly material and addresses new issues related to historical GIS.
In the United States we elect members of the House of Representative from single-member districts: the candidate who receives the most votes from each geographically defined district wins a seat in the House. This system—so long in place that it seems perfectly natural—is, however, unusual. Most countries use proportional representation to elect their legislatures. Electing the House is the first book-length study to explore how the US came to adopt the single-member district system, how it solidified into a seemingly permanent fixture of American government and whether it performs well by the standards it was intended to achieve. The US Constitution grants the states the authority to el...
Scholars, journalists, writers, and pundits have long regarded the South as the nation's most politically distinctive region. Its culture, history, and social and economic institutions have fostered unique political ideas that intrigue observers and have had profound political consequences for the nation's citizens, politicians, and policymakers. Writing Southern Politics is the most comprehensive review of the large body of post–World War II literature on southern politics. Since the publication of V.O. Key Jr.'s landmark work, Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), scholars have produced an astounding number of books, monographs, professional journal articles, and research papers ...
Political parties are the defining institutions of representative democracy and the darlings of political science, their governing and electoral functions among the chief concerns of the field. Yet they are often presented as grubby arenas of ambition, or worse. This book is a vigorous defence of their virtues.
This timely research handbook offers a systematic and comprehensive examination of the election laws of democratic nations. Through a study of a range of different regimes of election law, it illuminates the disparate choices that societies have made concerning the benefits they wish their democratic institutions to provide, the means by which such benefits are to be delivered, and the underlying values, commitments, and conceptions of democratic self-rule that inform these choices.
American political parties have long existed in a gray area of constitutional law because of their uncertain status. Parties in this country are neither fully public nor fully private entities. This constitutional ambiguity has meant that political parties are considered private organizations for some purposes and public ones for others. This “public-private entity” problem has arisen in many different legal contexts over the years. However, given their case-by-case method of judicial review, courts have typically dealt with only very discrete parts of this larger problem. This work is an endeavor to describe and analyze the constitutional status of political parties in this country by synthesizing the best judicial and scholarly thinking on the subject. In the final chapter, I draw on these ideas to propose my own scheme for how political parties might be best accommodated in a democracy.
Governments need rules, institutions, and processes to translate the will of the people into functioning democracies. Election laws are the rules that make that happen. Yet across the world various countries have crafted different rules regarding how elections are conducted, who gets to vote, who is allowed to run for office, what role political parties have, and what place money has in the financing of campaigns and candidates. The Routledge Handbook of Election Law is the first major cross-national comparative reference book surveying the electoral practices and law of the major and emerging democracies across the world. It brings together the leading international scholars on election law and democracy, examining specific issues, topics, or the regions of the world when it comes to rules, institutions, and processes regarding how they run their elections. The result is a rich volume of research furthering the legal and political science knowledge about democracies and the challenges they face. Scholars interested in election law and democracy, as well as election officials, will find the Routledge Handbook of Election Law an essential reference book.