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This book explores how popular democracy has paradoxically eroded trust in political systems worldwide, and how to restore confidence in democratic politics. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, democracies across the world have adopted measures to increase popular involvement in political decisions. Parties have turned to primaries and local caucuses to select candidates; ballot initiatives and referenda allow citizens to enact laws directly; many places now use proportional representation, encouraging smaller, more specific parties rather than two dominant ones. Yet voters keep getting angrier. There is a steady erosion of trust in politicians, parties, and democratic institutions, culminating most recently in major populist victories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. The authors argue that devolving power to the grass roots is part of the problem. Efforts to decentralize political decision-making have made governments and especially political parties less effective and less able to address constituents' long-term interests. They argue that to restore confidence in governance, we must restructure our political systems to restore power to the core institution of representative democracy: the political party.

Introduction. - 1. The Twenty-First-Century Wars Without Citizen Armies. - 2. War and Democracy in Classical Athens. - 3. The Glory That was Rome. - 4. A Millennium of Landed Aristocracy. - 5. The Emergence of Monarchy in France and Spain. - 6. War and Representation in England, the Netherlands, and Sweden. - 7. Italian Republics. - 8. Eastern Lands in Early Modern Europe. - 9. Mountain Republics. - 10. The Nine-teenth-Century Pivot. - 11. Twentieth-Centuty Wars of Full Mobilization. - 12. War, Racism, and Civil Rights in the United States. - Conclusions

Looking at women's power in the home, in the workplace, and in politics from a political economy perspective, Torben Iversen and Frances Rosenbluth demonstrate that equality is tied to demand for women's labor outside the home, which is a function of structural, political, and institutional conditions. They go on to explain several anomalies of modern gender politics: why women vote differently from men; why women are better represented in the workforce in the United States than in other countries but less well represented in politics; why men share more of the household work in some countries than in others; and why some countries have such low fertility rates.The first book to integrate the micro-level of families with the macro-level of national institutions, Women, Work, and Politics presents an original and groundbreaking approach to gender inequality

Japan's conservative Liberal Democratic Party swept both houses of parliament in December 2012 and July 2013 on a platform of Keynesian spending. Better known for fiscal stringency, the LDP "changed its spots" in part because 1994 electoral reforms force parties to compete on party platforms in place of clientelism.

Classical republican theories are monadic in the sense of seeing in each political regime a set of typical operating characteristics. There is disagreement as to what those characteristics are and specifically whether republican governments are more likely to be aggressive or peace loving. We group these two views as (democratic) mobilization theory versus (republican) checks theory and argue, first, that each can help us understand the finer structure of republican government; second, that they are not contradictory but can be combined in various ways in the same institutions; and third, that they offer the prospect of deepening our understanding of what is called the democratic peace proposition.