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This work presents the results of a comprehensive and integrated research project in comparative abortion policy and politics in post‐industrial democracies. It focuses on the questions of state feminism—the extent to which women's policy agencies further goals of women's movements for descriptive and substantive representation. In 11 countries in Western Europe and North America, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and the US, authors analyse the most significant debates on abortion policies from the 1970s through the 1990s. Following a common research design, individual researchers describe how each issue came to the public agenda, the goals of women's movement actors, the effectiveness of movement actors and women's policy agencies in inserting pro‐woman gendered perspectives into the issue frames, and the policy outcomes. They assess the success of the women's movement in gaining both access to the policy subsystem as well as favourable policy content. The comparative conclusion to the book examines several hypotheses in light of the descriptive information in the chapters. Have women's movement been successful in increasing their representation and thus making policy processes more democratic? To what extent have women's policy agencies been allies of movement activists? What explains patterns of movement success? In addition to state feminism theory, the conclusion assesses the explanatory power of theories of resource mobilization and political opportunity structure on women's movement effectiveness.

Civilian control over the military is widely hailed as among the biggest successes of India’s democracy. This is a rarity, especially among postcolonial states, and is rightfully celebrated. But has this come at a cost? The Absent Dialogue argues that the pattern of civil–military relations in India has hampered its military effectiveness. Indian politicians and bureaucrats have long been content with the formal and ritualistic exercise of civilian control, while the military continues to operate in institutional silos, with little substantive engagement between the two. In making this claim, the book closely examines the variables most associated with military effectiveness—weapons procurement, jointness (the ability of separate military services to operate together), officer education, promotion policies, and defense planning. India’s pattern of civil–military relations—best characterized as an absent dialogue—adversely affects each of these processes. Theoretically, the book adopts the “unequal dialogue” framework proposed by Eliot Cohen but also argues that, under some conditions, patterns of civil–military relations may more closely resemble an “absent dialogue.” Informed by more than a hundred and fifty interviews and recently available archival material, the book represents a deep dive into understanding the power and the limitations of the Indian military. It sheds new light on India’s military history and is essential reading for understanding contemporary civil–military relations and recurring problems therein. While the book focuses on India, it also highlights the importance of civilian expertise and institutional design in enhancing civilian control and military effectiveness in other democracies.

The book examines the experience of living in a society that has more information available to the public than ever before. It focuses on the interpretations, emotions, and practices of dealing with this abundance in everyday life. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and survey research conducted in Argentina, the book inquiries into the role of cultural and structural factors that mediate between the availability of information and the actual consequences for individuals, media, politics, and society. Providing the first book-length account of the topic in the Global South, it concludes that the experience of information abundance is tied to an overall unsettling of society, a reconstitution of how we understand and perform our relationships with others, and a twin depreciation of facts and appreciation of fictions.

The central argument of this book is that voting unity in European legislatures is not primarily the result of the ‘disciplining’ power of the leadership of parliamentary parties, but rather the result of a combination of ideological homogeneity through self-selection into political parties and the calculations of individual legislators about their own long-term benefits. Despite the central role of policy preferences in the subsequent behaviour of legislators, preferences at the level of the individual legislator have been almost entirely neglected in the study of parliaments and legislative behaviour. The book measures these using an until now under-utilized resource: parliamentary surveys. Building on these, the book develops measures of policy incentives of legislators to dissent from their parliamentary parties, and show that preference similarity amongst legislators explains a very substantial proportion of party unity, yet alone cannot explain all of it. Analysing the attitudes of legislators to the demands of party unity, and what drives these attitudes, the book argues that what explains the observed unity (beyond what preference similarity would explain) is the conscious acceptance by MPs that the long-term benefits of belonging to a united party (such as increased influence on legislation, lower transaction costs, and better chances of gaining office) outweigh the short-terms benefits of always voting for their ideal policy outcome. The book buttresses this argument through the analysis of both open-ended survey questions as well as survey questions on the costs and benefits of belonging to a political party in a legislature.

Access Points develops a new theory about how democratic institutions influence policy outcomes. Access Point Theory argues that the more points of access that institutions provide to interest groups, the cheaper lobbying will be, and, thus, the more lobbying will occur. This will lead to more complex policy, as policymakers insert specific provisions to benefit special interests, and, if one side of the debate has a lobbying advantage, to more biased policy, as the advantaged side is able to better take advantage of the cheaper lobbying. This book then uses Access Point Theory to explain why some countries have more protectionist and more complex trade policies than others; why some countries have stronger environmental and banking regulations than others; and why some countries have more complicated tax codes than others. In policy area after policy area, this book finds that more access points lead to more biased and more complex policy. Access Points provides scholars a powerful tool to explain how political institutions matter and why countries implement the policies they do.

This book explores the wide variation across states in convenience voting methods—absentee/mail voting, in-person early voting, same day registration—and provides new empirical analysis of the beneficial effects of these policies, not only in increasing voter turnout overall, but for disadvantaged groups. By measuring both convenience methods and implementation of the laws, the book improves on previous research. It draws generalizable conclusions about how these laws affect voter turnout by using population data from the fifty state voter files. Using individual vote histories, the design helps avoid bias in non-random assignment of states in adopting the laws. Many scholars and public officials have dismissed state election reform laws as failing to significantly increase turnout or address inequality in who votes. Accessible Elections underscores how state governments can modernize their election procedures to increase voter turnout and influence campaign and party mobilization strategies. Mail voting and in-person early voting are particularly important in the wake of Covid-19 to avoid election day crowds and ensure successful and equitable elections in states with large populations; the results of this study can help state governments more rapidly update voting for the 2020 general election and beyond.

Situated at the intersection of democratic theory and international studies, Accountability and Democracy provides an in-depth critical analysis of the concept “democratic accountability.” The book proceeds with separate chapters on accountability as found in the U.S. Ratification debates, agency theory, ancient Athenian democracy, theories of deliberative democracy, capitalist markets, and cosmopolitan democracy. Through an engagement with these different traditions and contexts, the book paints a picture of democratic accountability as a multidimensional concept harboring competing imperatives and diverse instantiations. It both engages conventional electoral models of accountability and moves beyond them by situating democratic accountability within more deliberative, participatory and agonistic contexts. Contrary to dominant views that emphasize discipline and control, the book describes democratic accountability as a source of mutuality, community, and political transformation. The book also challenges deep-seated understandings of democratic accountability as an expression of popular sovereignty. It instead argues that accountable governance is incompatible with all claims to ultimate authority, regardless of whether they refer to the demos, the state, or cosmopolitan public law. Rather than conceiving of democratic accountability as a way to legitimize a secure and sovereign political order, the book contends that destabilization and democratic insurgence are indispensable and often neglected facets of democratic accountability practices.

United States officials argued during America’s post-9-/11 wars that the US took every precaution to prevent unintended civilian death and injury — known as collateral damage — due to US military operations. Yet, during the first years of the wars, officials accepted the inevitability of the harm, and tens of thousands of civilians were killed and injured by the US and its allies. The book explores moral responsibility for three kinds of collateral damage incidents. Accidents were unforeseen and sometimes unforeseeable, and arguably they were comparatively rare. More numerous were systemic collateral damage deaths, the foreseeable consequence of rules of engagement, weapons choices, standard operating procedures and military doctrine. Proportionality/double effect collateral damage is foreseeable, and foreseen, yet anticipated military advantages are said to excuse this unintentional killing. Both systemic collateral damage, and proportionality/double effect collateral damage are produced in part by expansive and permissive conceptions of military necessity. The other causes of systemic collateral damage are found in the organization of warmaking — the institutionalized rules, procedures, training, and stresses of war. Depending on choices that are made at the organizational and command level, the likelihood of causing civilian casualties may rise or fall. When those factors, including beliefs about military necessity, change the incidence of collateral damage also changes. This book offers a new way to think about moral agency and accountability. The dominant paradigm of legal and moral responsibility in war stresses both intention and individual accountability. Yet that framework is inadequate for cases of systemic and proportionality/double effect collateral damage because the causes of those deaths and injuries lie at the organizational level — where doctrine, tactics, and weapons are decided. The author supplements theories of individual agency and accountability with a theory of collective moral responsibility, treating organizations as imperfect moral agents. The US military exercised moral agency when it began, mid-way through the Post-9/11 wars, to change its organizational procedures in order reduce collateral damage deaths. The book offers ways to increase political and public moral responsibility for conduct in war.

How can international organizations (IOs) like the United Nations (UN) and their implementing partners be held accountable if their actions and policies violate fundamental human rights? Political scientists and legal scholars have shed a much-needed light on the limits of traditional accountability when it comes to complex global governance. However, conventional studies on IO accountability fail to systematically analyze a related, puzzling empirical trend: human rights violations that occur in the context of global governance do not go unnoticed altogether; they are investigated and sanctioned by independent third parties. This book puts forward the concept of pluralist accountability, whereby third parties hold IOs and their implementing partners accountable for human rights violations. We can expect pluralist accountability to evolve if a competitive environment stimulates third parties to enact accountability and if the implementing actors are vulnerable to human rights demands. Based on a comprehensive study of UN-mandated operations in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kosovo, the European Union Troika’s austerity policy, and global public–private health partnerships in India, this book demonstrates how competition and human rights vulnerability shape the evolution of pluralist accountability in response to diverse human rights violations, such as human trafficking, the violation of the rights of detainees, economic rights, and the right to consent in clinical trials. While highlighting the importance of studying alternative accountability mechanisms, this book also argues that pluralist accountability should not be regarded as a panacea for IOs’ legitimacy problems, as it is often less legalized and might cause multiple accountability disorder.

How can the seeds of accountability ever grow in authoritarian environments? Embedding accountability into the state is an inherently uneven, partial, and contested process. Campaigns for public accountability often win limited concessions at best, but they can leave cracks in the system that serve as handholds for subsequent efforts to open up the state to public scrutiny. This book explores how civil society ‘thickens’ by comparing two decades of rural citizens' struggles to hold the Mexican state accountable, exploring both change and continuity before, during, and after national electoral turning points. The book addresses how much power-sharing really happens in policy innovations that include participatory social and environmental councils, citizen oversight of elections and the secret ballot, decentralized social investment funds, participation reforms in World Bank projects, community-managed food programs, as well as new social oversight and public information access reforms. Meanwhile, efforts to exercise voice unfold at the same time as rural citizens consider their exit options, as millions migrate to the US, where many have since come together in a new migrant civil society. This book concludes that new analytical frameworks are needed to understand ‘transitions to accountability’. This involves unpacking the interaction between participation, transparency, and accountability.

This book advances our understanding of the global dimension of social policy by applying the notion of global social governance to actors, their relationships to each other, and their pathways, as well as their footprints of influence in the specific policy fields of social concern in which they are active. Focusing on a broad array of individual and corporate global social policy actors, ranging from international organizations to state formations and NGOs, the chapters in this book draw a fuller picture of agency in global social policy than what current accounts provide. It considers the multiple facets of individual actors’ scope and legitimacy for a particular actor in conjunction with the configuration of global social governance as characterized by multi-centred and multi-scaled obstacles, as well as diverse forms of collaboration. The book studies the contextualised actors’ range and power in designing, shaping, and facilitating various global social policies. Thus, the chapters discuss the role of particular (corporate) actors within global social policy structures and assess the impact of a number of key organizations, states, groups, and individuals in the governance of global social policy. At the same time, a variety of social policy fields in which these actors are involved are addressed, including the labour market issues, family policy, health policy, and education policy, migration issues, and global (re)distribution via various forms of development aid or remittances.

Adaptation under Fire looks at the essential importance of military adaptation in winning wars. Every military must prepare for future wars despite inevitably having little confidence about the precise shape that those wars will take. As former US secretary of defense Robert Gates once noted, the United States has a perfect record in predicting the next war: “We have never once gotten it right.” Despite this uncertainty, military organizations still must make choices. They must determine the nature of doctrine they will need to fight effectively, the type of weaponry and equipment they must procure to defeat their potential foe, and the kind of leaders they must select and develop to guide the force to victory. Since the US military has global security responsibilities, it will have to make these choices without knowing when, where, or how the next war will unfold, or even who the enemy may be. It will need to adapt quickly and successfully in the face of the unexpected in order to prevail. The book starts by providing a framework for understanding adaptation and includes several historical examples of success and failure. The second part examines US military adaptation during the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and explains why certain forms of adaptation have proven so problematic. The final part argues that the US military must become more adaptable in order to successfully address the fast-changing security challenges of the 21st century, and concludes with some recommendations on how it should do so.

Contemporary public administration reflects its historical roots as well as contemporary ideas about how the public bureaucracy should be organized and function. This book argues that there are administrative traditions that have their roots centuries ago but continue to influence administrative behavior. Further, within Western Europe, North America, and the Antipodes there are four administrative traditions: Anglo-American, Napoleonic, Germanic, and Scandinavian. These are not the only traditions however, and the book also explores administrative traditions in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the Islamic world. In addition there is a discussion of how administrative traditions of the colonial powers influenced contemporary administration in Africa. These discussions of tradition and persistence also are discussed in light of the numerous attempts to reform and change public administration.

The governance of the modern corporation is broadly understood as the mechanisms, relations, and processes for balancing the interests of stakeholders. It spells out the rules and procedures for decision-making, accountability and transparency, and distributional rights. Corporate governance thus provides the framework in which corporate objectives are set, the means of attaining them, the kind of performance monitoring required, and by whom. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis and large-scale corporate failures, the issue of corporate governance has repeatedly received the attention of policy-makers and the wider public. Extending the study of corporate governance beyond that of listed corporations sheds new light on the overall performance of corporations in market economies. These include small and medium-sized corporations, non-profit organisations and philanthropic foundations, public corporations and public–private partnerships, social enterprises and cooperatives, international organisations, and corporations in cyberspace. A decade after the massive failures in the governance of financial corporations, and with continued governance failures in other parts of the economy since then, this volume takes stock and asks: what has been the performance of corporate governance regimes, and have regulatory changes and corporate governance codes made a difference? What are the strengths and weaknesses of current corporate governance systems and codes? How do corporate forms differ in their governance performance, and what have been the experiences across countries? And, finally, what implications for understanding governance behaviour and for policy-makers and regulators come to mind?

Many elections fail. The most overt malpractices used by rulers include imprisoning dissidents, harassing adversaries, coercing voters, vote-rigging counts, and finally, if losing, blatantly disregarding the people's choice. Administrative irregularities are also common, such as inaccurate electoral registers, ballot miscounts, and security defects. Flawed contests have triggered public protests and international criticism. It is time to take stock of these problems. This book addresses three related themes: what standards and evidence determine when elections fail? What strengthens effective, impartial, and independent electoral authorities? And, do failed contests undermine political legitimacy? International experts bring new concepts, theories, and evidence to illuminate these issues, drawing upon a range of cases in established democracies such as Britain and the United States, newer democracies in Central and Latin America, and diverse regimes in Africa and the Middle East. The book illuminates major themes in studies of democracy and democratization, comparative politics, elections and voting behavior, political sociology, international development, public opinion and political behavior, political institutions, and public policy.

The past few decades have witnessed the growth of movements that use digital means to connect with broader publics and express their point of view. Social media facilitate feelings of engagement, in ways that frequently make people feel reenergized about what it means to be political. In doing so, media do not make or break revolutions but they do lend emerging, storytelling publics their own means for feeling their way into the developing event, frequently by making them a part of the developing story. Digital technologies network us but it is our stories that connect us to each other, making us feel close to some and distancing us from others. Affective Publics explores how storytelling practices on Twitter facilitate affective engagement for publics tuning into a current issue or event by employing three case studies: Arab Spring movements, various iterations of Occupy, and everyday casual political expressions as traced through the archives of trending topics on Twitter.

African American candidates for statewide office in the United States face unique challenges given the nation’s complicated racial dynamics. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States had elected only one African American as governor in its history—L. Douglas Wilder, a grandson of slaves who achieved this historic goal in 1989 in Virginia, once the capital of the Confederacy. Numerous media accounts at the time declared a major breakthrough in racial politics in the United States with one national news magazine actually featuring in bold type on its cover “The End of the Civil War.” More than thirty years since Wilder’s election, while Black candidates have risen to office in states such as Illinois, Massachusetts, and California, there are not many successes for African American candidates seeking statewide office in the South. This is particularly puzzling because Blacks are most numerous in the South, as a percentage of the population. This book includes analyses of the campaigns of mostly unsuccessful and some successful Black statewide candidates in the South. The purpose is to untangle the factors that lead to electoral success for these candidates, and those that continue to hold them back, from the vantage of recent election cycles with some historically close races in the South featuring African American candidates for governor of Florida and Georgia (2018), for lieutenant governor in Virginia (2017), and for the US Senate in South Carolina and Georgia (2020). But statewide contests are not limited to state offices; some of the most important southern campaigns in the twenty-first century have featured Black candidates running in the southern presidential primaries. Most notably, Barack Obama’s 2008 nomination campaign blazed a trail in the South that many believed was a template for a new style of black politics. Examining broader regional demographic and political trends, the authors project that the South is on the threshold of a major breakthrough for African American statewide candidates, which will have a substantial role in not only fundamentally changing the political dynamics of the region, but nationally as well. This change will be driven by not only African American candidates and voters but a rising coalition regionally of minorities and also White voters increasingly willing to vote for Black candidates.

European welfare states are undergoing profound change, driven by globalisation, technical changes, and population ageing. More immediately the aftermath of the Great Recession and unprecedented levels of immigration have imposed additional pressures. This book examines welfare state transformations across a representative range of European countries and at the EU level, and considers likely new directions in social policy. It reviews the dominant neo-liberal austerity response and discusses social investment, fightback, welfare chauvinism and protectionism. It argues that the class solidarities and cleavages that shaped the development of welfare states are no longer powerful. Tensions surrounding divisions between old and young, women and men, immigrants and denizens, and the winners in a new more competitive world and those who feel left behind are becoming steadily more important. European countries have entered a period of greater political instability and this is reflected in policy directions. Austerity predominates nearly everywhere, but patterns of social investment, protectionism, neo-Keynesian intervention and fightback vary between countries. We identify areas of convergence and difference in European welfare state futures.

Between 1998 and 2010, an unprecedented wave of left-of-center candidates reached power in Latin America. In spite of a shared concern for social inequality and opposition to the Washington Consensus, their governments pursued dramatically different economic policies. Why did some governments reverse neoliberal economic policies amid the supremacy of market orthodoxy? Why did others embrace market orthodoxy after denouncing it for decades from the opposition? Why were nationalizations, price controls, and trade barriers implemented in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, but not in Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, and Uruguay? More generally, what are the conditions that make the initiation and maintenance of economic reforms likely? In answering these questions, this book conducts a theoretical and empirical study of economic reforms in Latin America. It takes stock of the left’s economic transformations in the region and challenges widely held views that resource dependence, economic crises, or strong executives are responsible for them. Instead, it argues that party systems are crucial in explaining reform: when institutionalized, party systems are likely to preserve the prevailing market orthodoxy; when in disarray, they are conducive to drastic economic changes. Marshalling evidence drawn from ten countries and case studies of the governments of Ricardo Lagos in Chile, Lula in Brazil, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, this study not only sheds light on one of the most puzzling aspects of contemporary Latin America, but also advances our general understanding of the left as a political ideology, economic reforms, and party systems beyond the region.

What should progressive social movements after Occupy be aiming for? What is the underlying economic vision and what are the ultimate economic goals? This book provides an answer to these questions. The book investigates the fundamental aspects of the contemporary economy by providing a perspective that integrates both normative and empirical concerns. Part One asks whether workplaces should be democratized and examines the empirical record of worker cooperatives. Part Two investigates the democratic potential of markets and examines the extent to which actual market systems, particularly the Nordic variety, have been democratized in practice. Part Three asks whether finance and investment institutions should be democratized and analyzes the empirical record of various experiments in this regard, including capital controls, public banks, and participatory budgeting. The book thus weaves together the different strands of economic democracy into a comprehensive whole. It culminates in an illustration of a truly democratic society in the form of market socialism. Yet while the book is hopeful it is not utopian. It invites us to pay close attention to the inherent costs and benefits of economic reforms. The ultimate argument is that although economic democracy is far from perfect, it represents a significant and substantial advance over contemporary American neoliberalism as well as European social democracy.