Norris, Pippa, and Christopher Wlezien. 2005.
Britain Votes 2005. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Even before George W. Bush gained reelection by wooing religiously devout "values voters," it was clear that church-state matters in the United States had reached a crisis. With Divided by God, Noah Feldman shows that the crisis is as old as this country - and looks to our nation's past to show how it might be resolved.
Today more than ever, ours is a religiously diverse society: Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist as well as Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. And yet more than ever, committed Christians are making themselves felt in politics and culture.
What are the implications of this paradox? To answer this question, Feldman makes clear that again and again in our nation's history diversity has forced us to redraw the lines in the church-state divide. In vivid, dramatic chapters, he describes how we as a people have resolved conflicts over the Bible, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the teaching of evolution through appeals to shared values of liberty, equality, and freedom of conscience. And he proposes a brilliant solution to our current crisis, one that honors our religious diversity while respecting the long-held conviction that religion and state should not mix.
Divided by God speaks to the headlines, even as it tells the story of a long-running conflict that has made the American people who we are.
Arguing that the Christian doctrine of revelation is necessary for understanding the prevenience of God's grace, Ronald Thiemann defends the doctrine of revelation by focusing on the identity and reality of the promising God depicted in the biblical narrative.
According to Thiemann, "The crisis of revelation has occurred within a cultural context decisively marked by radical pluralism. The modern defender of God's reality must seek to show how God is, both in relation and prior to those human concepts by which we seek to grasp his reality. He or she must do so by an argument which resists the reduction of theology to anthropology."
In analysis of such diverse thinkers as John Locke, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Thomas Torrance, Thiemann criticizes the epistemological foundationalism adopted by theologians to provide theoretical justification for the divine origins of Christian beliefs. He argues that the doctrine of revelation must be seen as an account supporting the intelligibility and truth of a set of Christian convictions. His notion of the "narrated promise" reveals God's prevenience as promiser and humanity as recipient of the promise. In an examination of the Gospel of Matthew, Thiemann shows how the biblical narrative identifies God as the God of promise and invites the reader to participate in God's prevenient reality.
The American public has consistently declared itself less concerned with foreign affairs in the post-Cold War era, even after 9/11, than at any time since World War II. How can it be, then, that public attentiveness to U.S. foreign policy crises has increased? This book represents the first systematic attempt to explain this apparent paradox. Matthew Baum argues that the answer lies in changes to television's presentation of political information. In so doing he develops a compelling "byproduct" theory of information consumption. The information revolution has fundamentally changed the way the mass media, especially television, covers foreign policy. Traditional news has been repackaged into numerous entertainment-oriented news programs and talk shows. By transforming political issues involving scandal or violence (especially attacks against America) into entertainment, the "soft news" media have actually captured more viewers who will now follow news about foreign crises, due to its entertainment value, even if they remain uninterested in foreign policy.
Baum rigorously tests his theory through content analyses of traditional and soft news media coverage of various post-WWII U.S. foreign crises and statistical analyses of public opinion surveys. The results hold key implications for the future of American politics and foreign policy. For instance, watching soft news reinforces isolationism among many inattentive Americans. Scholars, political analysts, and even politicians have tended to ignore the soft news media and politically disengaged citizens. But, as this well-written book cogently demonstrates, soft news viewers represent a largely untapped reservoir of unusually persuadable voters.
This book develops a framework for analyzing the creation and
consolidation of democracy. Different social groups prefer different
political institutions because of the way they allocate political power
and resources. Thus democracy is preferred by the majority of citizens,
but opposed by elites. Dictatorship nevertheless is not stable when
citizens can threaten social disorder and revolution. In response, when
the costs of repression are sufficiently high and promises of
concessions are not credible, elites may be forced to create democracy.
By democratizing, elites credibly transfer political power to the
citizens, ensuring social stability. Democracy consolidates when elites
do not have strong incentives to overthrow it. These processes depend
on the strength of civil society, the structure of political
institutions, the nature of political and economic crises, the level of
economic inequality, the structure of the economy, and the form and
extent of globalization.
Winner, John Bates Clark Medal, American Economic Association, 2005
Winner, Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, 2007
Winner, William H. Riker Award, Political Economy Section, 2007
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Austrian Empire ranked third among the world's oil-producing states (surpassed only by the United States and Russia) and accounted for five percent of global oil production. By 1918, the Central Powers did not have enough oil to maintain a modern military. How and why did the promise of oil fail Galicia (the province producing the oil) and the Empire?
In a brilliantly conceived work, Alison Frank traces the interaction of technology, nationalist rhetoric, social tensions, provincial politics, and entrepreneurial vision in shaping the Galician oil industry. She portrays this often overlooked oil boom's transformation of the environment, and its reorientation of religious and social divisions that had defined a previously agrarian population, as surprising alliances among traditional foes sprang up among workers and entrepreneurs at the workplace and in the pubs and brothels of new oil towns.
Frank sets this complex story in a context of international finance, technological exchange, and Habsburg history as a sobering counterpoint to traditional modernization narratives. As the oil ran out, the economy, the population, and the environment returned largely to their former state, reminding us that there is nothing ineluctable about the consequences of industrial development
After the collapse of communism, some thirty countries scrambled to craft democratic constitutions. Surprisingly, the constitutional model they most often chose was neither the pure parliamentary model found in most of Western Europe at the time, nor the presidential model of the Americas. Rather, it was semi-presidentialism—a rare model known more generally as the "French type." This constitutional model melded elements of pure presidentialism with those of pure parliamentarism. Specifically, semi-presidentialism combined a popularly elected head of state with a head of government responsible to a legislature.
Borrowing Constitutional Designs questions the hasty adoption of semi-presidentialism by new democracies. Drawing on rich case studies of two of the most important countries for European politics in the twentieth century-Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic-Cindy Skach offers the first theoretically focused, and historically grounded, analysis of semi-presidentialism and democracy. She demonstrates that constitutional choice matters, because under certain conditions, semi-presidentialism structures incentives that make democratic consolidation difficult or that actually contribute to democratic collapse. She offers a new theory of constitutional design, integrating insights from law and the social sciences. In doing so, Skach challenges both democratic theory and democratic practice. This book will be welcomed not only by scholars and practitioners of constitutional law but also by those in fields such as comparative politics, European politics and history, and international and public affairs.
Over the next few decades, global migration is likely to play an influential role in shaping the nature of politics and economies internationally. This timely study illuminates possible implications of migrant flows from a development perspective. The authors survey the magnitude of the poor to rich-country flows, the rich-country policies that are driving them, and the multiple channels through which skilled migration affects development. They provide a rich discussion of the policy options, as they search for those that avoid the worst losses to poor countries while maintaining the most liberal feasible international migration regime.
This book explores, through the lens of history, the dynamics between the press, politics, and public policy in Uganda. It illuminates and documents the various tensions and struggles for press freedom in the country since the establishment of the first newspaper in 1900. The book demonstrates that, despite Uganda's brush with multiple political systems over the decades—multiparty, one-party politics, military rule and no-party political arrangements—the press has always been at the receiving end of the stick. Consequently, journalists, in their yearnings for a legally unrestrictive media-free environment under a liberal socio-political atmosphere, have had to deploy various methods and approaches in dealing with the various state apparatuses.