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"The multi-layered political system of the European Union offers a unique environment for the study of comparative democracy. Its policies seek to give effect to an agreed range of values, including that of gender equality. This book explores gender equality and democratic politics in Europe. It discusses how democratic politics engages with gender equality in the European Union and examines what happens when a core democratic value of the European Union, equality between women and men, is given policy effect in supra-national and domestic level politics. It asks how embedded is this value in democratic politics and what degree of gender equality is expressed in this environment. The collection brings to light the gendered nature of democratic politics, offering a critical gaze on the workings of modern democracy in Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of democracy, European studies, gender, and key to courses seeking to incorporate a deeper gender perspective or evaluating democracy and democratic performance in institutions and decision-making"--

In recent years the United States and many other international donors have embraced civil society aid as a key tool of democracy promotion. They support thousands of NGOs around the world in the name of civil society development, investing in these organizations high hopes for fostering democratic participation and values. Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion critically examines this burgeoning field. A diverse, distinguished collection of democracy experts and civil society practitioners from both donor and recipient countries analyze civil society aid in five regions, including country case studies of South Africa, the Philippines, Peru, Egypt, and Romania. The authors focus on crucial issues and dilemmas, such as the relationship between donor conceptions of civil society and local realities, the effects of civil society programs, and how aid can be improved. The book's broad geographic reach, practical focus, and analytic rigor make it an invaluable guide to this vital new area of international affairs

How to achieve democratisation in the neopatrimonial and agrarian environments that predominate in sub-Saharan Africa continues to present a challenge for both development theory and practice. Drawing on intensive fieldwork in Western Uganda, this paper argues that Charles Tilly's 'democratisation as process' provides us with the framework required to explain the ways in which particular kinds of association can advance democratisation from below. Moving beyond the current focus on how elite-bargaining and certain associational forms may contribute to liberal forms of democracy, this approach helps identify the intermediate mechanisms involved in building democracy from below, including the significance of challenging categorical inequalities, notably through the role of producer groups, and of building trust networks, cross-class alliances and synergistic relations between civil and political society. The evidence and mode of analysis deployed here help suggest alternative routes for supporting local efforts to build democracy from below in sub-Saharan Africa.

Franco de Sa details a new perverse form of neutralization prevalent today. He highlights the dangers inherent in the obverse of the metaphysical obsession with presence, namely, in the veiling and withdrawal of power. Starting with Foucault's "biopolitics of populations," where power is invisibly present, Franco de Sa suggests that today people witness an even more insidious "visible absence" of power, which defines what he calls "the cryptopolitics of populations." Rather than overcome metaphysics, the absolute overturning of its ideal of pure presence repeats all the pitfalls of metaphysical politics, which must be kept at bay by exposing, or making visible, the self-encryption of political power. Adapted from the source document.

Despite the existence of an extensive literature, no definitive conclusion seems to emerge on the extent to which minorities are guaranteed by democratic rules in political systems. This paper contributes to this debate by proposing a modified Heigselmann and Krauss two-dimensional model of preferences in order to capture the role of abstention on minority representativeness. Regardless of the typology of abstention, simulation results show that voter abstention always benefits minorities.

This book aims to build a solid and proper contribution to the contemporary global debate on the experience of democracy and its possibilities as the most effective mediator of a series of challenges, a debate that is necessarily rooted in the critical reassessment of its Greek cultural heritage. The book is articulated around the identification of a concrete problem: the need for studies that critically discuss Athenian democracy, seen as a daily problem and practice, based on its staseis (crises) and metabolai (changes), and whose solutions and strategies may still contribute to the reflection on the social, intellectual and ethical-political challenges of contemporary democracy.

This is a thesis about expansions of consumer choice, their causal effects on political engagement, and the democratic implications that follow. For material and ideological reasons alike, consumer choices have expanded over the last decades and are likely to become even more present in citizens' lives in the future. Scholars' appraisal of this expansion of consumer choice ranges from, on the one hand, seeing it as a threat to active citizenship to, on the other hand, celebrating it as inherently democratic. The thesis accepts the assumed democratic potential of consumer choice as a means for conveying legitimate political preferences and affecting political outcomes. Yet the introduction shows that, from the perspective of normative democratic theory, citizens' consumer choices are under most circumstances democratically inferior to civic engagement that addresses formal political decision-making. It is thus a pressing question whether there actually are elements in consumer choices that reduce citizens' inclination to engage in conventional forms of political participation. This empirical question is addressed in the three essays. The essays tap the effects of consumer choices in different contexts, such as parents' school choices for their children (Essay I), consumer choices that interact with citizens' political motivations, i.e. "political consumption," (Essay II), and consumer choices regarding plainly private consumer goods (Essay III). All the three essays account for causality and do so by means of experimental designs. In addition, the essays are similar in that their results point in the same direction: expansions of consumer choice reduce citizens' willingness to conventional political participation. Given the democratic significance of conventional participation and the pervasiveness of consumer choice, the results are important both from a scholarly perspective and from a broader societal perspective. The results cast new light on a wide range of issues about the extension of consumer choices and their presence in citizens' lives, including e.g. decisions about user choice in welfare services and advertising regulation. This thesis does by no means end the discussion about such policies, but demonstrates the significance of a certain outlook: issues about the extension of consumer choice are issues about democratic values.

Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age is about why ordinary people in a democratizing state oppose democracy and how they leverage both traditional and social media to do so. Aim Sinpeng focuses on the people behind popular, large-scale antidemocratic movements that helped bring down democracy in 2006 and 2014 in Thailand. The yellow shirts (PAD—People's Alliance for Democracy) that are the focus of the book are antidemocratic movements grown out of democratic periods in Thailand, but became the catalyst for the country's democratic breakdown. Why, when, and how supporters of these movements mobilize offline and online to bring down democracy are some of the key questions that Sinpeng answers. While the book primarily uses a qualitative methodological approach, it also uses several quantitative tools to analyze social media data in the later chapters. This is one of few studies in the field of regime transition that focuses on antidemocratic mobilization and takes the role of social media seriously.

Introduction : adaptation and opposition in democracy and dictatorship -- Opposition and adaptation : Reichert and Lange in the Weimar Republic -- Confidence and complicity : confronting National Socialist ideology -- Conflict and co-ordination : creating a National Socialist economy -- Impotence : Jakob Reichert in the Nazi wartime economy -- Indispensability : Karl Lange in the Nazi wartime economy -- Conclusion.