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Over the course of the last century, political scientists have been moved by two principal purposes. First, they have sought to understand and explain political phenomena in a way that is both theoretically and empirically grounded. Second, they have analyzed matters of enduring public interest, whether in terms of public policy and political action, fidelity between principle and practice in the organization and conduct of government, or the conditions of freedom, whether of citizens or of states. Many of the central advances made in the field have been prompted by a desire to improve both the quality and our understanding of political life. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in re...
Examines impact of political regimes on economic development between 1950 and 1990.
A truly authoritative study of a "model American union" (IAM has long been known as one of the most ethical and efficient), based on complete access to the organization's files. Beginning with an interpretive history to 1953, the book analyzes IAM's formal and informal structure and its policies with regard to other unions, employers, public, and government, isolating dynamic features of the decision making process. It includes documented evidence of the difficulties and analyzes both sides of the many controversies IAM has faced.
Few observers of Mexico and Brazil in the 1930s, or South Korea and Taiwan in the mid-1950s, would have predicted that these nations would become economic "miracles" several decades later. These newly industrializing countries (NICs) challenge much of our conventional wisdom about economic development and raise important questions about international competitiveness and export success in manufacturing industries. In this volume economists, sociologists, and political scientists seek to explain the growth of the NICs in Latin America and East Asia and to reformulate contemporary development theory through an in-depth analysis of these two dynamic regions. Gary Gereffi and Colin I. Bradford, J...
The Politics of Mass Society explores the social conditions necessary for democracy and the vulnerabilities of large scale society to totalitarian systems. Mass movements mobilize people who are alienated from the social system, who do not believe in the legitimacy of the established order, and who are therefore ready to engage in efforts to destroy. Contrary to the psychological approach prevalent in European doctrines of mass movements, Kornhauser persuasively argues that social order is the critical factor. The greatest number of people available to mass movements are located in those segments of society that have the fewest ties to social order. The book draws on a wide range of material...
Students of government and social power recognize that wherever governmental systems embrace popular elections, the functions and mechanisms of political finance constitute inevitable links of influence between economic structures and political processes. The transmu tation of economic power into political power has been of historic concern from ancient philosophers to modern political scientists. Efforts to discern and interpret the political roles of those engaged in funding candidates and political parties have intensified in recent years. Attention given the subject has deepened substantially in the United States since World War II and, while there have been differ ences in range and qua...
This book, originally published in 1978, constitutes a genuinely comparative study of the world's only truly succesful democratic socialist parties: the Social Democraic Parties of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The measure of achievement is not merely political success, the fact that in Scandinavia the Social Democrats have become 'natural parties of goverment', for just as importantly, the author shows that a political success grounded on the symbiotic relationship between party and trade union movement has been the foundation for a higher level of welfare state provision and egalitarian striving than in virtually any other advanced Western nations. It is a book for friends and foes of democratic socialism alike; for the former to provide an understanding of the tasks ahead and for the latter to know the enemy better.
Neoliberalism, which advocates free markets without government interference, has become increasingly utilized and controversial over the last three and a half decades. This book presents case studies of Chile and Taiwan, two countries that seemingly prospered from adopting neoliberal strategies, and finds that their developmental histories challenge neoliberalism in fundamental ways. From one perspective, the political economies of Chile and Taiwan might appear to be poster children for neoliberalism. Both took aggressive policy actions (Taiwan in the 1960s and Chile in the 1970s) to create market-driven economies that were well integrated into the capitalist global economy. Subsequently, th...