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"Political participation -- Case studies"
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Empowered participation
Every month in every neighborhood in Chicago, residents, teachers, school principals, and police officers gather to deliberate about how to improve their schools and make their streets safer. Residents of poor neighborhoods participate as much or more as those from wealthy ones. All voices are heard. Since the meetings began more than a dozen years ago, they have led not only to safer streets but also to surprising improvements in the city's schools. Chicago's police department and school system have become democratic urban institutions unlike any others in America.
Empowered Participationis the compelling chronicle of this unprecedented transformation. It is the first comprehensive empirical analysis of the ways in which participatory democracy can be used to effect social change. Using city-wide data and six neighborhood case studies, the book explores how determined Chicago residents, police officers, teachers, and community groups worked to banish crime and transform a failing city school system into a model for educational reform. The author's conclusion: Properly designed and implemented institutions of participatory democratic governance can spark citizen involvement that in turn generates innovative problem-solving and public action. Their participation makes organizations more fair and effective.
Though the book focuses on Chicago's municipal agencies, its lessons are applicable to many American cities. Its findings will prove useful not only in the fields of education and law enforcement, but also to sectors as diverse as environmental regulation, social service provision, and workforce development.
eBook
Mobilizing for democracy : citizen action and the politics of public participation
Using new empirical case studies from around the world, this book illustrates how alternative forms of political mobilization - protests, social participation, activism, litigation & lobbying - engage with the formal institutions of representative democracy in ways that constitute the very essence of democratic politics.
Book
Civil Society Activism under Authoritarian Rule
This book examines how civil society actors operate under authoritarian constraints, and examines how this is linked to regime change.
This book moves beyond traditional notions of civil society and explains the complexity of state-society relations in authoritarian contexts outside the framework of democratization. Rejecting a wholly normative approach, the contributors focus on the whole range of civic activism under authoritarianism, from resistance to support for the political system in place. They explain how activism under authoritarianism is subject to different structures, and demonstrate how active citizens have tried to claw back powers of expression and contestation, but also sought to create a voice for themselves as privileged interlocutors of authoritarian regimes.
With a strong empirical focus on a wide range of countries and authoritarian regimes, this book presents cross-country comparisons on Spain, Portugal, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Cuba, Chile, Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Afghanistan and Burma.
Civil Society Activism under Authoritarian Rule will be of interest to students and scholars of international politics, comparative politics, civil society, authoritarianism and regime change.
eBook
Citizen action and national policy reform
Which factors help to make myriad efforts by diverse actors add up to reform? What is needed to overcome setbacks, and to consolidate the smaller victories? Aid agencies have invested heavily in supporting civil society organizations as change agents which configure power relations and transform governance structures. In the rush to go global or stay local, however, the national policy sphere was recently neglected. Today, there is growing recognition of the key role of champions of change inside national governments, and the potential of their engagement with citizen activists outside. Citizen Action and National Policy Reform brings together eight studies of successful cases of citizen activism in South Africa, Morocco, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Turkey, India and the Philippines. Drawing on influential social science theory about how political and social change occurs, the authors bring new empirical insights to bear on it, both challenging and enriching current understanding.
eBook
A Theory of Militant Democracy
How should pro-democratic forces safeguard representative government from anti-democratic forces? By granting rights of participation to groups that do not share democratic values, democracies may endanger the very rights they have granted; but denying these rights may also undermine democratic values. Alexander Kirshner offers a set of principles for determining when one may reasonably refuse rights of participation, and he defends this theory through real-world examples, ranging from the far-right British Nationalist Party to Turkey's Islamist Welfare Party to America's Democratic Party during Reconstruction.
eBook
The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911
In this classic study (1977), James Hayes examines local leadership in six villages and townships in Hong Kong's rural New Territories during the late Qing. Drawing on a wealth of documentary sources and on fieldwork carried out while serving as a district officer, Hayes makes a powerful argument for the part played by ordinary men — peasants and shopkeepers — in running their own communities almost without interference from either the gentry or state officials. This new edition has a substantial new introduction by the author which reviews the research in the light of later scholarly studies
eBook