Political Science

This book provides a broad overview of the main trends in mass attitudes towards domestic politics and European integration from the 1970s until today. Particularly in the last two decades, the ‘end of the permissive consensus’ around European integration has forced analysts to place public opinion at the centre of their concerns. The book faces this challenge head on, and the overview it provides goes well beyond the most commonly used indicators. On the one hand, it shows how integration's deepening and enlargement involved polities and societies whose fundamental traits in terms of political culture — regime support, political engagement, ideological polarization — have remained anything but static or homogeneous. On the other hand, it addresses systematically what Scharpf (1999) has long identified as the main sources of the democratic deficits of the EU: the lack of a sense of collective identity, the lack of a Europe-wide structure for political accountability, and the lack of recognition of the EU as a legitimate political authority. In other words, it focuses on the fundamental dimensions of how Europeans relate to the EU: identity (the sense of an ‘European political community’; representation (the perception that European elites and institutions articulate citizens' interests and are responsive to them); and policy scope (the legitimacy awarded to the EU as a proper locus of policy-making). It does so by employing a cohesive theoretical framework derived from the entire IntUne project, survey and macro-social data encompassing all EU member countries, and state-of-the-art methods.

The political history of modern India is intimately intertwined with the history of the Indian National Congress. The Congress is unique not only for its longevity but also for its role in the building of the Indian nation. This book seeks to analyse important aspects of political change at a time when India is at once a rising power with an expanding middle class and a poor, unequal, and misgoverned country through the story of the shifts in the politics and strategy of the Congress Party. It investigates the structure and direction of change within the party and its governance agenda, essentially in its policy and strategy and in its organization and leadership after Indira Gandhi. It is a thematic account of political processes and the discursive and policy practices that shaped the thinking and approach of the Congress, and provides an interpretation of the politics of change in India and how this shaped the development of the Congress, especially under the United Progressive Alliance. It considers economic liberalization, the Ayodhya issue and the re-emergence of the Congress as a ruling party in 2004. This volume also analyzes how the dualist structure in the Congress leadership influenced the perception of the people about the party.

What do we really mean when we say a political party has changed? And exactly what is it that drives that change? Political scientists working in the comparative tradition have come up with a general explanation that revolves around the role of election defeats and loss of office, and around changes of leader and factions. But how well does that explanation cope when subjected to a historically-grounded and therefore robust examination? This book attempts to answer that question by subjecting the common wisdom to a real-world, over-time test using half a century in the life of one of the world’s oldest and most successful political parties to provide a series of in-depth case studies. What do the periods spent in both opposition and government by the British Conservatives since 1945 tell us about what drives parties to change their sales-force, the way they organise, and the policies they come up with? Using internal papers, memos and minutes of meetings from party archives, along with historical and contemporary accounts, memoirs and interviews, this book maps the extent of change and then explores what may have driven it. The conventional wisdom, it turns out, is not necessarily wrong but incomplete, requiring both qualification and supplementation. This approachably-written book suggests when, how and why.

The book sets out to examine the processes by which Europeanization takes place. Europeanization is defined as the process by which the key decisions about public policies are gradually transferred to the European level (or for new policy areas, emerge at the European level). This is in contrast to definitions of Europeanization which focus on the adaption of member states to European public policies. Thus, the main focus is whether a European Union ‘policy-making state’ is being created via changes in the distribution of power between member states and the European level institutions over time. In addition to several overview chapters (such as on agenda setting in the EU), there are twelve sectoral studies which analyse the differing trajectories and outcomes of the Europeanization process and the extent to which the European Union can make ‘authoritative allocations’. The case studies have been selected in order to illustrate the degree of cross-sectoral variation in the process of Europeanization, from sectors which have yet to see very much Europeanization, such as health, to sectors such as competition policy which are almost fully Europeanized. The book is consciously multi-theoretic in its approach, drawing on a range of theories and concepts, from theories of European integration, to theories of public policy processes.

The book is motivated by a disjuncture in social science research on ethnicity, politics and economics: Although theories of the formation of ethnic groups are driven by the constructivist assumption that ethnic identities can change over time, theories of the effect of ethnicity on economic and political outcomes are driven by the primordialist assumption that these identities are fixed. This book is a first cut at building—and rebuilding—our theories of politics and economics on a fortified constructivist foundation. It proposes a new conceptual framework for thinking about ethnic identity. It uses this framework to synthesize constructivist arguments into a set of testable propositions about how and why ethnic identities change. It translates this framework—and the propositions derived from it—into a new, combinatorial language. And it employs these conceptual, constructivist, and combinatorial tools to theorize about the relationship between ethnicity, politics and economics using a variety of methods. Taking the possibility of change in ethnic identity into account, this book shows, dismantles the theoretical logics linking ethnic diversity to negative outcomes and processes such as democratic destabilization, clientelism, riots and state collapse. Even more importantly, it changes the questions we can ask about the relationship between ethnicity, politics and economics

The field of deliberative civic engagement is rapidly growing around the world—but it remains highly fragmented. Motivated by the widely recognized need to pool the collective experience and knowledge of scholars, practitioners, and advocates, this book represents the first comprehensive assessment of deliberative civic engagement. Each chapter in the book addresses a broad, yet specific “big question” about deliberative civic engagement, and reviews both published and unpublished writings across disciplines, settings, locations, and processes to assess what we know, how we know it, and what we do not yet know. Part I provides a broad overview of deliberative civic engagement, defining terms and examining the many organizations doing work related to deliberative civic engagement. Part II introduces the reader to process and design issues central to deliberative civic engagement, including questions about recruitment and participation, communication, inclusion and diversity, and the use of online tools. Part III examines issues integral to deliberative civic engagement, including questions about the impacts and outcomes of such processes for individuals, communities, and policy, and well as questions about the evaluation of such processes. Part IV concludes the book with two chapters. This book examines and responds to critics' concerns about deliberative civic engagement. The other draws together the work in the previous sections, examining uncertainties and unresolved questions, and looks to the future, developing an agenda for the advancement of the practice and study of deliberative civic engagement.

In an age when the United Nations has declared access to the Internet a human right, and universal access to high-speed broadband is a national goal, urban areas have been largely ignored by federal policy. Federal policies have focused on rural infrastructure. Yet, the U.S. is a metropolitan nation, and urban applications offer unparalleled advantages for addressing both innovation and inequalities in broadband access. This neglect may result in the failure to realize the social benefits of broadband and a broadly-connected digital society. Connecting various levels of analysis, from the nation to the neighborhood, the authors break new ground and challenge assumptions in several areas. Offering evidence that mobile-only Internet users have dramatically lower levels of online activity and skill, they argue that this has become a second-class form of access, affecting many minorities and urban poor. Digital citizenship and full participation in economic, social, and political life requires home access. Using multilevel statistical models, the authors present new data ranking broadband access and use in the nation's 50 largest cities and metropolitan areas, showing considerable variation across places. Unique, neighborhood data from Chicago examines the impact of poverty and segregation on access in a large and diverse city, and parallels analysis of national patterns in urban, suburban and rural areas. Together, the chapters demonstrate the significance of place for shaping our digital future, and the need for policies that recognize cities as critical for addressing both social inequality and opportunity.

Policy dismantling is a distinctive form of policy change, which involves the cutting, reduction, diminution, or complete removal of existing policies. The perceived need to dismantle existing policies normally acquires particular poignancy during periods of acute economic austerity. However, scholars of public policy have been rather slow to offer a comprehensive account of the precise conditions under which particular aspects of policy are dismantled, grounded in systematic empirical analysis. Although our overall understanding of what causes policy to change has accelerated a lot in recent decades, there remains a bias towards the study of either policy expansion or policy stability. Dismantling does not even merit a mention in most public policy textbooks. Yet without an account of both expansion and dismantling, our understanding of policy change in general, and the politics surrounding the cutting of existing policies, will remain frustratingly incomplete. This book seeks to develop a more comparative approach to understanding policy dismantling by looking in greater detail at the dynamics of cutting in two different policy fields: one (social policy) which has been subjected to study before, and the other (environmental policy) which has not. On the basis of a systematic analysis of the existing literatures in these two fields, it develops a new analytical framework for measuring and explaining policy dismantling. Through an analysis of six, fresh empirical cases of dismantling written by leading experts, it reveals a more nuanced picture of change, focusing on what actually motivates actors to dismantle, the strategies they use to secure their objectives and the politically significant effects they ultimately generate. Dismantling Public Policy is essential reading for anyone wanting to better understand a hugely important facet of contemporary policy and politics. It will inform a range of student courses in comparative public policy, politics, social and environmental policy.

This volume provides a comparative study of exit with regard to international operations of a state-building nature. The chapters focus on the empirical experiences of, and scholarly and policy questions associated with, exit in relation to four families of experience: colonial administrations, peace support operations, international territorial administrations, and transformative military occupations. In all of these cases, state-building, broadly conceived, has been a key objective, undertaken most often in conditions of fragility or in the aftermath of armed conflict. The chapters offer detailed accounts of practice associated with exit—examining the factors that bore on the decisions by external actors to scale down or terminate an operation; investigating the nature of any planning for withdrawal; exploring whether exits were devised with clear objectives in mind; and assessing the effects of the exit strategies employed, especially in relation to peace and stability. The volume also addresses issues of a more thematic nature, notably recent institutional innovations that are intended to help manage transitions; the political economy of exit; competing normative visions of exit; and the policy implications of the analysis contained here. The case studies and the thematic essays combined reflect the key experiences and issues that are most relevant to a study of exit strategies.

Some of the nation's wealthiest philanthropies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in education reform. With vast wealth and a political agenda, foundations have helped to reshape the reform landscape in urban education. In this book, Sarah Reckhow shows where and how foundation investment in education is occurring and analyzes the effects of these investments within the two largest urban districts, New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, centralized political control and the use of private resources have enabled rapid implementation of reform proposals. Yet this potent combination of top-down authority and outside funding also poses serious questions about transparency, responsiveness, and democratic accountability in New York. Meanwhile, a slower, but possibly more transformative set of reforms has been taking place in Los Angeles. These reforms were also funded and shaped by major foundations, but they work from the bottom up, through charter school operators managing networks of schools. This strategy has built grassroots political momentum and demand for reform in Los Angeles that is unmatched in New York City and other districts with mayoral control.