Books on the topic 'Embedded democracy'

When compared to various forms of autocracy, monarchy, theocracy, oligarchy, and dictatorship, democracies are better at solving, routinizing, and institutionalizing basic problems of common social life and collective action. This article explores the historical origins of ideas that articulate and justify contemporary democratic theory and practice. First, it surveys the conceptual questions embedded in the concept of democracy inherited from the Greek, demokratia—literally, the power (kratos) of the people (demos), though commonly translated as rule of the people. Embedded in this concept of democracy we find at least four basic classes of questions: Who are “the people”? At what level of organization is “self-government” directed? How is the rule of the people translated into collective decisions and actions? Why is democracy good? The answers to these questions form, as it were, the history of democratic theory from the perspective of what historical democratic ideas and practices might contribute to the present and future of democracy.

The author's theory of rights was developed in an earlier book. This successor volume includes applications, lectures, replies to critics, and clarifications. For the author, rights exist only if they are embedded in the operative practices of a community. People have a right in a community if their claim is acknowledged, and if they would acknowledge similar claims by others. This account contrasts with theories of natural rights, which state that humans have rights by virtue of being human. It also differs from Kantian attempts to derive rights from the necessary conditions of rationality. While denying that rights exist independently of a community's practices, the book maintains that rights to personal autonomy and authority ought to exist in all communities. Group rights, an anathema among individualistic theories, are a valuable institution. The book's discussion of rights appropriate for minority communities is particularly illuminating as a model of careful reasoning.

Chapter 1 examines racial ideology and how racial democracy works in Cuba. The revolution, throughout its decades, has reinforced the ideology of racial democracy and in doing so, has created a set of norms that guide much of the thinking and doing around race and racism in Cuba. These norms are silence regarding racism; anti-racialism; and an understanding of racism as racial prejudice, rather than systemic racism embedded in the country’s institutions. The ideology of racial democracy or racial harmony serves to legitimate the racial status quo by trivializing racial hierarchies or refuting them completely. Consequently the ideology has created, over time, standard ways of perceiving race, or racial norms. In addition to racial norms, the chapter also discusses racial categorization in Cuba and its relationship to racial ideology.

This article describes many facets of the French Revolution. The French Revolution introduced parliamentary government to France, but it was only “an apprenticeship in democracy,” the first step towards modern, democratic politics, not its consummation. François Furet has controversially argued that the values and practices of democracy were not definitively embedded in France until the consolidation of the Third Republic in the 1870s, which he describes as “the French Revolution coming into port.” A continuing focus of research, therefore, are the ways in which the people entered politics outside the formal processes, namely in the dramatic expansion in civil society, which had been developing since the mid-eighteenth century, but which in the Revolution flowered with the collapse of censorship, empowering a wide cross-section of French society.

Contemporary democracy is in crisis. People are losing faith in in a system of democratic institutions that can cope with current social problems. The book sheds new light on this issue, drawing on the ideas of M. M. Bakhtin, American pragmatism, and others to show that dialogue in democracy can transcend both antagonistic and consensual perspectives. The author provides an overview of the history of the dialogue-vs.-antagonism opposition as it is embedded in modern political theory, and outlines the concept of dialogue in contemporary political thought. The author argues that dialogue is a value in and by itself and that it aims at better understanding rather than at consensus. Therefore, the main purpose of the democratic system is to promote better understanding. This idea is labelled as “non-consensual democracy.” The author goes on to demonstrate that Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism can usefully amend and augmet the ways in which community is addressed in political theory, allowing us to overcome allowing us to overcome the liberalism-vs.-communitarianism debate. To conclude, he introduces the concept of |”critical community,” i.e., a "dialogical, self-reflective community critical of its own tradition," to show that collective identities can be constructed in critical dialogue with the tradition and the values of a community.

Employee voice appears to be the latest in a long line of terms used to describe employment practices designed to allow workers some ‘say’ in how their organizations are run; previous variants include worker participation, industrial democracy, employee involvement, and empowerment. The term is rarely defined precisely, and voice tends to incorporate HR practices of both a direct and an indirect form, in unionized and non-union settings, and in task-related and off-line teams. This article first develops a framework within which different forms of voice can be considered. Second, it discusses links between embedded voice and worker perceptions, focusing on the use of multiple and ‘deep’ techniques. Third, it analyzes a number of factors promoting or impeding voice at national, organizational, and workplace levels, in so doing noting the tensions surrounding the concept. Finally, some conclusions are drawn.

This introductory chapter discusses how the Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education Collective (PCARE) attempts to put democracy into practice by merging prison education and activism. While dozens of studies have described what is wrong with America's prison-industrial complex—its embedded racism and sexism, its perpetual violence, its skewed judicial and legislative aspects, and its corresponding media spectacles, among others—the chapter presents real-world answers based on years of pragmatic activism and engaged teaching. It recognizes that the men and women in prisons and jails have left behind them trails of wreckage—they harmed others and caused immeasurable pain. Meanwhile, the victims of violent crime attest that their lives are forever altered. The chapter foregrounds these facts and argues that the only way to end the cycle of violence is by moving past the anger and fear.

In the turbulent interwar period, the political ‘Left’ was one of the most visible protagonists, with historians continuing to disagree about the role it played in shaping the outcome of the political struggles. Embedded in strong ‘moral narratives’ about the ‘rise of fascism’, the ‘crisis of democracy’, and the nature of the Bolshevik Revolution, the political Left has been vilified or lionized. For the period from the mid-1920s until 1939, both supporters and detractors agree that the Left was on the defensive, internally divided and weakened by the Great Depression and subject to repression by the state, whether democratic, authoritarian, or Stalinist. This chapter argues that the failure narrative should not subsume the vibrant experimentation and rich and contradictory diversity of the Left experience. A portrait emerges of the interwar Left that wrestled with inevitably imperfect and varied solutions to the ‘problem of community life’ in twentieth-century mass society.

The Conclusion argues that the nation’s attachment to policy romanticism prevents its social maturation. Incorporating freely chosen, widely cherished values, policy romanticism remains antagonistic to liberal democracy, or at least to the Enlightenment hopes for social progress. Americans are not innocent of American problems. The nation’s problems are created as the effects of consensual, embedded norms. In contrast, the control of social policy making by illegitimate elites is so improbable that mass preference and mass consent would seem to be a logical default position. Mass consent should be specifically refuted with hard evidence of conspiracies of one sort or another before considering other explanations. The political passivity of Americans signaling contentment or at least acceptance is a more reasonable surmise than the success of hidden evil forces in pacifying the population through a narcosis of liquor, drugs, and the nearly infinite diversions of numbing entertainment.

The longest chapter in The Discourses, and longer than any chapter in The Prince, is about conspiracies. Machiavelli was tortured and exiled because he was falsely accused of planning a conspiracy against the Medici, and he is very careful about how he addresses the issue, but there is a remarkably democratic vision embedded in his argument. The chapter begins by borrowing a question from the contemporary political theorist, Bonnie Honig: Why don’t we think of conspiratorial politics as democratic? What do we lose by only focusing on “open,” agonistic democracy? Although he argues that conspiracies should be avoided, Machiavelli describes a transformative political path that is ultimately democratic, because the power to make war on a prince is limited to very few, but “the power to conspire against him is granted to everybody.” This hidden democratic potential is one surprise that we find by reading politics with Machiavelli.

The Internet has leapt from human-facing display screens into the material objects all around us. In this so-called Internet of Things—connecting everything from cars to cardiac monitors to home appliances—there is no longer a meaningful distinction between physical and virtual worlds. Everything is connected. The social and economic benefits are tremendous, but there is a downside: an outage in cyberspace can result not only in a loss of communication but also potentially a loss of life. Control of this infrastructure has become a proxy for political power, since countries can easily reach across borders to disrupt real-world systems. This book argues that this diffusion of the Internet into the physical world radically escalates governance concerns around privacy, discrimination, human safety, democracy, and national security, and it offers new cyber-policy solutions. The book makes visible the sinews of power already embedded in our technology and explores how hidden technical governance arrangements will become the constitution of our future.

Breaking new ground in scholarship on gender and politics, Performing Representation is the first comprehensive analysis of women in the Indian Parliament. It explores the possibilities and limits of parliamentary democracy and the participation of women in its institutional performances. Performing Representation offers a new, multi-method analysis of the gendered nature of India’s Parliament. Through an examination of electoral data, media reports, and life stories of women MPs it sheds light on the performance, aesthetics, and norms of parliamentary life. It explores how the gendered axis of power underpins the performance of Parliament and its members as well as the political economy in which they are embedded. The book makes a strong case for taking parliamentary politics seriously in these times of populism, without either a utopian framing of women MPs as challengers of masculinized institutional politics or seeing them simply as docile actors in a gendered institution. Performing Representation raises critical questions about the politics of difference, claim-making, representation, and intersectionality. It addresses these questions as part of global feminist debates on the importance of women’s representation in political institutions.

Countering recent rises in many countries of inequality in income and wealth is widely recognized as a major development challenge. This is so from an ethical perspective and because greater inequality is perceived to be detrimental to key development aims. Still, an informed debate on the effects of inequality requires clear evidence. This review contributes to the literature by taking stock and providing an overview of current knowledge of the impact of income inequality on three important outcomes: economic growth, health and education as two dimensions of human development, and governance, with a focus on democracy. Drawing on the insights from different disciplines and considering recent work, it reveals that existing evidence provides somewhat mixed results and argues for a need for further in-depth empirical work. It also points to explanations for the lack of consensus embedded in data quality and availability, measurement issues, and the shortcomings of the different methods employed. Finally, we point to promising future research avenues relying on experimental work for micro level analysis, more region- and country-specific studies, and reiterate the need for improvements in the availability and reliability of data.

Night Raiders: Burglary and the Making of Modern Urban Life in London, 1860–1968 is the first history of burglary in modern Britain. Until 1968, burglary was defined in law as occurring only between the ‘night-time’ hours of nine p.m. and six a.m. in residential buildings. Time and space gave burglary a unique cloak of terror, since burglars’ victims were likely to be in the bedroom, asleep and unawares, when the intruder crept in, prowling near them in the darkness. Yet fear sometimes gave way to sexual fantasy. Eroticized visions of handsome young thieves sneaking around the boudoirs of beautiful, lonely heiresses emerged alongside tales of violence and loss in popular culture, confounding social commentators by casting the burglar as criminal hero. Night Raiders charts how burglary lay historically at the heart of national debates over the meanings of ‘home’, experiences of urban life, and social inequality. This book explores intimate stories of the devastation caused by burglars’ presence in the most private domains, showing how they are deeply embedded within broader histories of capitalism and liberal democracy. The fear and fascination towards burglary were mobilized by media, state, and market to sell insurance and security technologies, whilst also popularizing the crime in fiction, theatre, and film. Cat burglars’ rooftop adventures transformed ideas about the architecture and policing of the city, and post-war ‘spy-burglars’ theft of information illuminated Cold War skirmishes across the capital. More than any other crime, burglary shaped the everyday rhythms, purchases, and perceptions of modern urban life.

Various forms of academic co-operation criss-cross the modern university system in a bewildering number of ways, from the open exchange of ideas and knowledge, to the sharing of research results, and frank discussions about research challenges. Embedded in these scholarly networks is the question of whether a global template for the management of both higher education and national research organisations is necessary, and if so, must institutions slavishly follow the high-flown language of the global knowledge society or risk falling behind in the ubiquitous university ranking system? Or are there alternatives that can achieve a better, more ethically inclined, world? Basing their observations on their own experiences, an interesting mix of seasoned scholars and new voices from southern Africa and the Nordic region offer critical perspectives on issues of inter- and cross-regional academic co-operation. Several of the chapters also touch on the evolution of the higher education sector in the two regions. An absorbing and intelligent study, this book will be invaluable for anyone interested in the strategies scholars are using to adapt to the interconnectedness of the modern world. It offers fresh insights into how academics are attempting to protect the spaces in which they can freely and openly debate the challenges they face, while aiming to transform higher education, and foster scholarly collaboration. The Southern African-Nordic Centre (SANORD) is a partnership of higher education institutions from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. SANORDs primary aim is to promote multilateral research co-operation on matters of importance to the development of both regions. Our activities are based on the values of democracy, equity, and mutually beneficial academic engagement.

On the one hand, the idea of a capitalist peace is a set of loosely integrated, but testable propositions. On the other hand it is part of a wider, libertarian philosophy of life. The spirit of this wider conception is best expressed by a quote from a pioneer of quantitative international politics, in 1981 Rummel wrote, “If you want peace, then minimize the power of government.” Although there has been a proliferation of variables assessing capitalism and economic interdependence—from economic freedom via contract intensity to the avoidance of state ownership or protectionism—the most frequently analyzed proposition about the capitalist peace says that trade makes military conflict and war less likely. By and large, the evidence supports this proposition in dyadic designs as well as in monadic designs. This cross-design validity of the proposition is important, because it distinguishes the peace by trade proposition from the democratic peace proposition. Most researchers agree that war is extremely unlikely in dyads where both nations are democracies. But only a minority contends that democracies are less frequently involved in military conflict than other states. The dyadic and the monadic findings are compatible because military conflict looks even more likely between an autocracy and a democracy than between two autocracies. Whereas the democratic peace is limited in application, the pacifying impact of trade or economic interdependence is more general. Moreover, the democratic peace may be embedded in a wider economic or capitalist peace. There is strong evidence that democracy rests on a foundation of capitalism or economic freedom and the prosperity that has been gained only by capitalism or some degree of economic freedom. Moreover, economic freedom and prosperity contribute to the avoidance of civil war. Better still: Economic freedom does not only promote economic growth and prosperity among those nations where people enjoy economic freedom, but the economic freedom of rich countries provides poor countries with the advantages of backwardness and catch-up opportunities.Capitalist peace theory evolves. It has been suggested that the pacifying impact of trade rests on the expectation that trade, or access to resources and markets, will continue. This suggestion requires a new look at economic sanctions, too. By interfering with trade, sanctions must undermine the expectation of future benefits of trade and globally interconnected markets. Given the rareness of evidence in favor of the effectiveness of economic sanctions in eliminating undesirable policies of other nations, a capitalist peace perspective implies the recommendation to use sanctions much less frequently than politicians do. They are likely to eliminate a pacifying factor when it is most urgently needed.The wider or visionary perspective on the capitalist peace is useful not only in connecting it with the issue of sanctions, but also in demonstrating the inherent limitations of capitalism as a tool to achieve peace. From a static perspective, capitalism, economic freedom, or trade may exert some pacifying impact, as argued above. But capitalism is a dynamic economic order. It is about “creative destruction”. Capitalism is not egalitarian. Nations grow at different speeds. They rise and decline. Capitalism and unequal economic growth upset pecking orders and contribute to power transitions that are related to risks of war, especially great power war. Whether the contribution of capitalism to power transitions—or its pacifying impact prevails—cannot be judged with much confidence.