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Plasser examines the changing practices of election campaigning worldwide. Based on data of an indepth survey of campaign managers and political consultants from 43 countries, he provides insights into the professional role definitions and strategic orientations determining the future of electioneering in media-centered democracies. The first section gives a state-of-the-art overview of the international literature and modernization theories describing and analyzing the ongoing process of mod...

Political parties provide a crucial link between voters and politicians. This link takes a variety of forms in democratic regimes, from the organization of political machines built around clientelistic networks to the establishment of sophisticated programmatic parties. Latin American Party Systems provides a novel theoretical argument to account for differences in the degree to which political party systems in the region were programmatically structured at the end of the twentieth century. Base...

Development aid has become the subject of much discussion. Why do we give aid, and does it help? What do we know about the development paths being taken by various countries, or the possibilities of helping them to achieve their goals from outside? How relevant is development aid now that remittances and foreign direct investments have increased as a result of globalization? When does aid have more negative than positive effects? What is the significance of shifting power relations in the world?...

International evidence points to a widespread decline in the economic standard of living for the family. This trend is reinforced by a number of underlying tendencies, including stagnating wages, the rise of unemployment, weak labor participation, poor housing affordability, limited saving, and skyrocketing personal debt. These realities are also affecting young adults, who, in a historically unprecedented trend, are likely to be worse off than their parents. This book identifies the reason for...

Understanding the institutions of the European Union is vital to understanding how it functions. This book provides students with a user-friendly introduction to the main institutions, and explains their different roles in the functioning and development of the European Union. Key features: * introduces and explains the functions of all the main institutions dividing them into those that have a policy-making role, those that oversee and regulate, and those that operate in an advisory capacity...

What are the key factors that have transformed the Israeli political center and how will they shape Israel's role in the Middle East in the 1990s? Well-known experts join the editors, Reich and Kieval, in giving a unique picture of current and future trends in Israeli politics, focusing on the movement of the Israeli body politic to the right-of-center and the growing hold of Likud. They define future prospects, taking into account foreign policy, economic, and demographic issues. Academics, pol...

In this exploration of the administration of law and its role in the lives of ordinary people in the northern provinces of the Roman Empire, Serena Connolly draws upon a rich but little-known legal collection from the late 3rd century known as the Codex Hermogenianus. The codex is composed of imperial responses to petitions sent to Rome, written by a team of the emperor's legal experts. These petitions and responses provide a wealth of information about provincial legal administration and the li...

China's dramatic economic growth in the last two decades of the last century and the prospect of its rise as a great power in this new one have greatly increased its weight and importance in world affairs. Consequently the progress, or lack of progress, of China's transition to democracy has become a central concern of the international community. This timely collection brings together many well-known scholars to systematically explore China's current government and assess that transition toward...

The recent dramatic expansion of the field of transnational studies has reshaped discourses across the humanities and social sciences and created the opportunity for extensive multi-regional exchanges. Traversing Transnationalism intervenes into these developments by offering essays from scholars working both within and outside the metropolitan "centre", and by reorientating the axis of research towards geopolitical and cultural formations located beyond the normal sites of production of globali...

Democracy (Made in Taiwan) argues that post-colonialism and Confucianism met at the historical moment when democratization and liberalization occurred in Taiwan. The familiar political science standards take little note of either Confucianism or postcolonialism. In fact, these standards are unbalanced, wishful, and Washington-centric, and result in a misunderstanding of Taiwan's performance. The liberal bias blinds international observers to the hybrid characteristics embedded in Taiwan's postco...

Can Iranians and Americans find common ground to overcome their troubled history? U.S.-Iran Misperceptions is the first written dialogue on the key issues that separate these two great countries. Bringing together former policy makers and international relations experts from the United States and Iran, U.S.-Iran Misperceptions: A Dialogue provides new insights into and arguments about how each country’s elites view the other, and how misperceptions have blocked the two from forging a normal and...

World Out of Balance is the most comprehensive analysis to date of the constraints on the United States' use of power in pursuit of its security interests. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth overturn conventional wisdom by showing that in a unipolar system, where the United States is dominant in the scales of world power, the constraints featured in international relations theory are generally inapplicable. In fact, the authors argue that the U.S. will not soon lose its leadership position; ra...

Partisan gerrymandering, the drawing of legislative district lines to deliberately favor one political party, has been present and controversial in American politics since before the ratification of our Constitution. Yet in the past couple of decades, parties in power at the state level have developed greater expertise than ever before at redistricting to their own advantage. Since 2010, a series of legislative, electoral, and judicial events have given this issue a prominence it has never befor...

Technological change is one of the main contemporary challenges and sources of uncertainty facing mainland China and Taiwan. It is also a key cause of the rapid political, economic and cultural shifts that characterise contemporary relations between the two. The issue has clear policy relevance for both sides and this book offers a truly original contribution to current research on the subject that can appeal to both academic and professional audiences. The chapters are based on research by inte...

This cogent but comprehensive book examines the international relations of the People's Republic of China since its founding in 1949. Noted scholar Robert G. Sutter provides a balanced assessment of the country's recent successes and advances as well as the important legacies and constraints that hamper it, especially in nearby Asia-long the focus of China's foreign policy attention. Advances the PRC has made in other parts of the world focus mainly on commercial interests, limiting its actual i...

Although Singapore's struggle for independence was led by politicians promising democracy, the leaders have sought to maintain power by reversing democratic practices and subverting democratic institutions. The case for Singapore's government today is based on economic prosperity that has raised the per capita income of the country into the top ten states of the world. The case against Singapore's government is that the economic policies have been copied from Hong Kong, the rule of law has becom...

The Soviet polity is presently going through its most difficult transition ever. The Russian Center's point of view is that the crisis is an issue of imperialism: the decline and fall of the old Russian empire, the undoing of the pax Russica, the derangement of the Russian imperial consciousness. From the viewpoint of the former march-lands of the empire, the issue is nationalism. Since Mikhail Gorbachev launched his reform program under the rubric of perestroika and glasnost, the most dramatic...