Autocracy in the Provinces

Autocracy in the Provinces
Author: Valerie Ann Kivelson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780804725828

This book explores the possibilities for rich and varied social, cultural, and political development under the rule of an autocratic state. The author situates Muscovite history within a comparative framework, demonstrating that seventeenth-century Russia was neither backward nor peculiar, but developed its own variant of the concurrent state-building processes of Western European monarchies.

The Promise of Power

The Promise of Power
Author: Maya Tudor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2013-03-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1107032962

Under what conditions are some developing countries able to create stable democracies while others have slid into instability and authoritarianism? To address this classic question at the center of policy and academic debates, The Promise of Power investigates a striking puzzle: why, upon the 1947 Partition of British India, was India able to establish a stable democracy while Pakistan created an unstable autocracy? Drawing on interviews, colonial correspondence, and early government records to document the genesis of two of the twentieth century's most celebrated independence movements, Maya Tudor refutes the prevailing notion that a country's democratization prospects can be directly attributed to its levels of economic development or inequality. Instead, she demonstrates that the differential strengths of India's and Pakistan's independence movements directly account for their divergent democratization trajectories. She also establishes that these movements were initially constructed to pursue historically conditioned class interests. By illuminating the source of this enduring contrast, The Promise of Power offers a broad theory of democracy's origins that will interest scholars and students of comparative politics, democratization, state-building, and South Asian political history.

Authoritarian Police in Democracy

Authoritarian Police in Democracy
Author: Yanilda María González
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2020-11-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108900380

In countries around the world, from the United States to the Philippines to Chile, police forces are at the center of social unrest and debates about democracy and rule of law. This book examines the persistence of authoritarian policing in Latin America to explain why police violence and malfeasance remain pervasive decades after democratization. It also examines the conditions under which reform can occur. Drawing on rich comparative analysis and evidence from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, the book opens up the 'black box' of police bureaucracies to show how police forces exert power and cultivate relationships with politicians, as well as how social inequality impedes change. González shows that authoritarian policing persists not in spite of democracy but in part because of democratic processes and public demand. When societal preferences over the distribution of security and coercion are fragmented along existing social cleavages, politicians possess few incentives to enact reform.

Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes

Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes
Author: Tom Ginsburg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2014
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1107047668

This volume explores the form and function of constitutions in countries without the fully articulated institutions of limited government.

Liberty from All Masters

Liberty from All Masters
Author: Barry C. Lynn
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2020-09-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1250240638

Barry C. Lynn, one of America's preeminent thinkers, provides the clearest statement yet on the nature and magnitude of the political and economic dangers posed by America’s new monopolies in Liberty from All Masters. "Very few thinkers in recent years have done more to shift the debate in Washington than Barry Lynn." —Franklin Foer Americans are obsessed with liberty, mad about liberty. On any day, we can tune into arguments about how much liberty we need to buy a gun or get an abortion, to marry who we want or adopt the gender we feel. We argue endlessly about liberty from regulation and observation by the state, and proudly rebel against the tyranny of course syllabi and Pandora playlists. Redesign the penny today and the motto would read “You ain’t the boss of me.” Yet Americans are only now awakening to what is perhaps the gravest domestic threat to our liberties in a century—in the form of an extreme and fast-growing concentration of economic power. Monopolists today control almost every corner of the American economy. The result is not only lower wages and higher prices, hence a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. The result is also a stripping away of our liberty to work how and where we want, to launch and grow the businesses we want, to create the communities and families and lives we want. The rise of online monopolists such as Google and Amazon—designed to gather our most intimate secrets and use them to manipulate our personal and group actions—is making the problem only far worse fast. Not only have these giant corporations captured the ability to manage how we share news and ideas with one another, they increasingly enjoy the power to shape how we move and play and speak and think.

Information for Autocrats

Information for Autocrats
Author: Melanie Manion
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2015-12-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1107049113

This book studies representation in Chinese local congresses, drawing on qualitative fieldwork and quantitative surveys of congressmen and women.

Mortal Republic

Mortal Republic
Author: Edward J. Watts
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2018-11-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465093825

Learn why the Roman Republic collapsed -- and how it could have continued to thrive -- with this insightful history from an award-winning author. In Mortal Republic, prize-winning historian Edward J. Watts offers a new history of the fall of the Roman Republic that explains why Rome exchanged freedom for autocracy. For centuries, even as Rome grew into the Mediterranean's premier military and political power, its governing institutions, parliamentary rules, and political customs successfully fostered negotiation and compromise. By the 130s BC, however, Rome's leaders increasingly used these same tools to cynically pursue individual gain and obstruct their opponents. As the center decayed and dysfunction grew, arguments between politicians gave way to political violence in the streets. The stage was set for destructive civil wars -- and ultimately the imperial reign of Augustus. The death of Rome's Republic was not inevitable. In Mortal Republic, Watts shows it died because it was allowed to, from thousands of small wounds inflicted by Romans who assumed that it would last forever.

From Autocracy to Democracy to Technocracy

From Autocracy to Democracy to Technocracy
Author: Victor N. Shaw
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1527560953

This book explores human polity with respect to its nature, context, and evolution. Specifically, it examines how individual wills translate into political ideologies, investigates what social forces converge to shape governmental operations, and probes whether human polity progresses in focus from individual wills to group interests to social integrations. The book entertains five hypotheses. The first is commonsensical: where there are people there is politics. The second is analogous: humans govern themselves socially in a way that is comparable to how a body regulates itself physically. The third is rational: humans set rules, organize activities, and establish institutions upon facts, following reasons, for the purpose of effectiveness and efficiency. The fourth is random: human affairs take place haphazardly under specific circumstances while they overall exhibit general patterns and trends. The final hypothesis is inevitable: human governance evolves from autocracy to democracy to technocracy. The book presents systematic information about human polity, its form, content, operation, impact, and evolution. It sheds light on multivariate interactions among human wills, rights, and obligations, political thoughts, actions, and mechanisms, and social structures, processes, and order maintenances. Pragmatically, it offers invaluable insights into individuals as agents, groupings as agencies, and polity as structuration across the human sphere.

Welfare for Autocrats

Welfare for Autocrats
Author: Jennifer Pan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2020-04-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190087447

What are the costs of the Chinese regime's fixation on quelling dissent in the name of political order, or "stability?" In Welfare for Autocrats, Jennifer Pan shows that China has reshaped its major social assistance program, Dibao, around this preoccupation, turning an effort to alleviate poverty into a tool of surveillance and repression. This distortion of Dibao damages perceptions of government competence and legitimacy and can trigger unrest among those denied benefits. Pan traces how China's approach to enforcing order transformed at the turn of the 21st century and identifies a phenomenon she calls seepage whereby one policy--in this case, quelling dissent--alters the allocation of resources and goals of unrelated areas of government. Using novel datasets and a variety of methodologies, Welfare for Autocrats challenges the view that concessions and repression are distinct strategies and departs from the assumption that all tools of repression were originally designed as such. Pan reaches the startling conclusion that China's preoccupation with order not only comes at great human cost but in the case of Dibao may well backfire.

Revolutionary Russia

Revolutionary Russia
Author: Oskar Anweiler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 380
Release: 1968
Genre: History
ISBN:

Cosponsored by the Joint Committee for Slavic Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Russian Research Center of Harvard University. Bibliographical footnotes.