Author: Scott M. Roulier
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319688103
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
This book argues that the design of built spaces influences civic attitudes, including prospects for social equality and integration, in America. Key American architects and planners—including Frederick Law Olmsted, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Moses, and the New Urbanists—not only articulated unique visions of democracy in their extensive writings, but also instantiated those ideas in physical form. Using criteria such as the formation of social capital, support for human capabilities, and environmental sustainability, the book argues that the designs most closely associated with a communally-inflected version of democracy, such as Olmsted's public parks or various New Urbanist projects, create conditions more favorable to human flourishing and more consistent with a democratic society than those that are individualistic in their orientation, such as urban modernism or most suburban forms.
Author: Jill Long Thompson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253050448
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
"We live in an age that demonstrates the powerful need for ethics in government. Democracy is a privilege that carries with it important responsibilities for the people and their representatives. As we look back on this era and determine the future of this nation, Dr. Long Thompson's book will be a resource for Americans who are seeking ways to secure our democracy and our future as a nation." Congressman John Lewis, Georgia's 5th District. Ethical leadership, steeped in integrity and fairness, matters. The future of our nation and our world depends upon the quality of America's character. In this uncompromising, absorbing look at our government and society today, Jill Long Thompson persuasively argues that we all have a meaningful role to play in shaping America's character and future. The citizenry, as well as their elected officials, are responsible for protecting fairness of participation and integrity in elections, as well as in the adoption and execution of laws. In this troubling time when the public is losing trust and confidence in our government, Jill Long Thompson shows us a bipartisan way forward.
Author: William J. Novak
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674260449
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America. In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. The last time American public life had been so thoroughly altered was in the late eighteenth century, at the founding and in the years immediately following. William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated peopleÕs rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power. Arguing against the myth that America was a weak state until the New Deal, New Democracy traces a steadily aggrandizing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was flexing power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognized, putting the lie to libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.
Author: Susan J. Carroll
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139447898
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Gender and Elections offers a systematic, lively, multi-faceted account of the role of gender in the electoral process through the 2004 elections. This timely, yet enduring, volume strikes a balance between highlighting the most important developments for women as voters and candidates in the 2004 elections and providing a more long-term, in-depth analysis of the ways that gender has helped shape the contours and outcomes of electoral politics in the United States. Individual chapters demonstrate the importance of gender in understanding and interpreting presidential elections, voter participation and turnout, voting choices, congressional elections, the participation of African American women, the support of political parties and women's organizations, candidate communications with voters, and state elections. Without question, this book is the most comprehensive, reliable, and trustworthy resource on the role of gender in electoral politics.
Author: David Green
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
Author: Benjamin I. Page
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022672994X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
“Important and riveting . . . The solution isn’t to redistribute wealth from the have-mores to the have-lesses. It’s to redistribute political power to everyone.” —Robert B. Reich America faces daunting problems—stagnant wages, high health care costs, neglected schools, deteriorating public services. How did we get here? Through decades of dysfunctional government. In Democracy in America? veteran political observers Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens marshal an unprecedented array of evidence to show that while other countries have responded to a rapidly changing economy by helping people who’ve been left behind, the United States has failed to do so. Instead, we have actually exacerbated inequality, enriching corporations and the wealthy while leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves. What’s the solution? More democracy. More opportunities for citizens to shape what their government does. To repair our democracy, Page and Gilens argue, we must change the way we choose candidates and conduct our elections, reform our governing institutions, and curb the power of money in politics. By doing so, we can reduce polarization and gridlock, address pressing challenges, and enact policies that truly reflect the interests of average Americans. Updated with new information, this book lays out a set of proposals that would boost citizen participation, curb the power of money, and democratize the House and Senate. “Brilliant, indispensable, and highly accessible.” —New York Journal of Books
Author: David F. Ericson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226216845
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
A reinterpretation of opposing positions in the debate over the origins of American political tradition; the Hartz v.s. the Bailyn viewpoints.
Author: Alan Tully
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421436000
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 437
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Book Description
Originally published in 1994. In this pathbreaking book Alan Tully offers an unprecedented comparative study of colonial political life and a rethinking of the foundations of American political culture. Tully chooses for his comparison the two colonies that arguably had the most profound impact on American political history—New York and Pennsylvania, the rich and varied colonies at the geographical and ideological center of British colonial America. Fundamental to the book is Tully's argument that out of Anglo-American influences and the cumulative character of each colonial experience, New York and Pennsylvania developed their own distinctive but complementary characteristics. In making this case Tully enters—from a new perspective—the prominent argument between the "classical republican" and "liberal" views of early American public thought. He contends that the radical Whig element of classical republicanism was far less influential than historians have believed and that the political experience of New York and Pennsylvania led to their role as innovators of liberal political concepts and discourse. In a conclusion that pursues his insights into the revolutionary and early republican years, Tully underlines a paradox in American political development: not only were the pathbreaking liberal politicians of New York and Pennsylvania the least inclined towards revolutionary fervor, but their political language and concepts—integral to an emerging liberal democratic order—were rooted in oligarchical political practice. "A momentous contribution to the burgeoning literature on the middle Atlantic region, and to the vexed question of whether it constitutes a coherent cultural configuration. Tully argues persuasively that it does, and his arguments will have to be reckoned with like few that have gone before, even as he develops an array of differences between the two colonies more subtle and penetrating than any of his predecessors has ever put forth."—Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania.
Author: Rachel Louise Moran
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Americans are generally apprehensive about what they perceive as big government—especially when it comes to measures that target their bodies. Soda taxes, trans fat bans, and calorie counts on menus have all proven deeply controversial. Such interventions, Rachel Louise Moran argues, are merely the latest in a long, albeit often quiet, history of policy motivated by economic, military, and familial concerns. In Governing Bodies, Moran traces the tension between the intimate terrain of the individual citizen's body and the public ways in which the federal government has sought to shape the American physique over the course of the twentieth century. Distinguishing her subject from more explicit and aggressive government intrusion into the areas of sexuality and reproduction, Moran offers the concept of the "advisory state"—the use of government research, publicity, and advocacy aimed at achieving citizen support and voluntary participation to realize social goals. Instituted through outside agencies and glossy pamphlets as well as legislation, the advisory state is government out of sight yet intimately present in the lives of citizens. The activities of such groups as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Children's Bureau, the President's Council on Physical Fitness, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) implement federal body projects in subtle ways that serve to mask governmental interference in personal decisions about diet and exercise. From advice-giving to height-weight standards to mandatory nutrition education, these tactics not only empower and conceal the advisory state but also maintain the illusion of public and private boundaries, even as they become blurred in practice. Weaving together histories of the body, public policy, and social welfare, Moran analyzes a series of discrete episodes to chronicle the federal government's efforts to shape the physique of its citizenry. Governing Bodies sheds light on our present anxieties over the proper boundaries of state power.
Author: Zoltan Hajnal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108487009
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
Race, more than class or any other factor, determines who wins and who loses in American democracy.
