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In the early 1990s, competitive elections in the Russian Federation signaled the end of the authoritarian political system dominated by a single political party. More than ten years and many elections later, a single party led by Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens to end Russia's democratic experiment. Russia's experience with new elections is not unique but it does challenge existing theories of democratic consolidation by showing that competitive elections cannot guarantee successful democratic consolidation. This book explores the conditions under which electoral competition contributes to democratic development by examining impact of elections on democratic consolidation. The theoretic framework focuses on the construction of infrastructure that transforms competitive elections into mechanisms of democratic development and shows how candidates for national parliamentary office systematically chose electoral strategies that undermined Russia's democratic foundation and created the conditions for a new single party autocracy to emerge.
Bringing together prominent scholars in the field, this Handbook provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the complex interrelationship between migration and welfare. Chapters further examine the effects of emigration on sending societies exploring issues such as the impact of remittances, diasporas, and skill deterioration as a result of human capital flight on capacity building and on economic and political development more generally.
The Risk of Social Policy? uses a comparative perspective to systematically analyse the effects of social policy reforms and welfare state retrenchment on voting choice for the government. It re-examines twenty elections in OECD countries to show if and how social policy issues drive elections. This book contributes to the existing literature by providing an empirical analysis of the electoral implications of social policy. Giger asks the basic research question: What are the electoral consequences of social policy performance and retrenchment? More specifically, the following questions are addressed in order to provide a systematic test of the topic: Is retrenchment indeed completely unpopu...
Returning migrants have been involved in post-socialist transformation processes all across Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Engaged in politics, the economy, science and education, arts and civil society, return migrants have often exerted crucial influence on state and nation-building processes and on social and cultural transformations. However, remigration not only comprises stories of achievements, but equally those of failed integration, marginalization, non-participation and lost potential - these are mostly stories untold. The contributions to this volume shed light on processes of return migration to various Eastern and Southeastern European countries from multidisciplinary perspectives. Particular attention is paid to anthropological approaches that aim to understand the complexities of return migration from individual perspectives.
Readership: Scholars and students of political science, especially those interested in comparative political economy, institutional change and comparative politics
This comprehensive and authoritative Encyclopedia, featuring entries written by academic experts in the field, explores the diverse topics within the discipline of political sociology. By looking at both macro- and micro-components, questions relating to nation-states, political institutions and their development, and the sources of social and political change such as social movements and other forms of contentious politics, are raised and critically analysed.
This book examines how democracy influences state-building and market-building in 25 post-communist countries from 1990 to 2004.
Few places are more revealing than the Alps to grasp the uneven EU core-periphery dynamics intrinsic to the EU border regime. In 2015, the reintroduction of controls at northern Italian borders, as a response to asylum seekers’ mobility, gave rise to a series of conflicts, contradictions and solidarities which this book explores. The ethnographic analysis of the everyday life of the French/Italian and Austrian/Italian borders makes visible the impacts of governance strategies which promote social polarization to contain potentially subversive moments of disruptions and transgressions. By contextualizing the governance of borders and migration in a broader framework, which includes the governance of EU states’ debt, Alpine Border Conflicts focuses on the effects of border regimes not only on migrants but also on EU societies.
"In the rich and growing body of work on democracy, there has been little attention to the connection between democracy and migration; and when there is, it is usually in connection with countries that see in-migration rather than out-migration. The latter is the focus of this book, which looks specifically at remittances--money sent from a migrant back to their home country--and how they reshape the internal balance of power by influencing the incentives and opportunities for political action among individuals receiving remittance income. Not only do remittances provide the resources that make contentious collective action possible, but they also reduce households' dependence on state-deliv...