The Logic of Political Survival

The Logic of Political Survival
Author: Bruce Bueno De Mesquita
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 634
Release: 2005-01-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262261774

The authors of this ambitious book address a fundamental political question: why are leaders who produce peace and prosperity turned out of office while those who preside over corruption, war, and misery endure? Considering this political puzzle, they also answer the related economic question of why some countries experience successful economic development and others do not. The authors construct a provocative theory on the selection of leaders and present specific formal models from which their central claims can be deduced. They show how political leaders allocate resources and how institutions for selecting leaders create incentives for leaders to pursue good and bad public policy. They also extend the model to explain the consequences of war on political survival. Throughout the book, they provide illustrations from history, ranging from ancient Sparta to Vichy France, and test the model against statistics gathered from cross-national data. The authors explain the political intuition underlying their theory in nontechnical language, reserving formal proofs for chapter appendixes. They conclude by presenting policy prescriptions based on what has been demonstrated theoretically and empirically.

The Politics of Survival

The Politics of Survival
Author: Marc Abélès
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822390779

In this provocative analysis of global politics, the anthropologist Marc Abélès argues that the meaning and aims of political action have radically changed in the era of globalization. As dangers such as terrorism and global warming have moved to the fore of global consciousness, foreboding has replaced the belief that tomorrow will be better than today. Survival, outlasting the uncertainties and threats of a precarious future, has supplanted harmonious coexistence as the primary goal of politics. Abélès contends that this political reorientation has changed our priorities and modes of political action, and generated new debates and initiatives. The proliferation of supranational and transnational organizations—from the European Union to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to Oxfam—is the visible effect of this radical transformation in our relationship to the political realm. Areas of governance as diverse as the economy, the environment, and human rights have been partially taken over by such agencies. Non-governmental organizations in particular have become linked with the mindset of risk and uncertainty; they both reflect and help produce the politics of survival. Abélès examines the new global politics, which assumes many forms and is enacted by diverse figures with varied sympathies: the officials at meetings of the WTO and the demonstrators outside them, celebrity activists, and online contributors to international charities. He makes an impassioned case that our accounts of globalization need to reckon with the preoccupations and affiliations now driving global politics. The Politics of Survival was first published in France in 2006. This English-language edition has been revised and includes a new preface.

Political Survival of Small Parties in Europe

Political Survival of Small Parties in Europe
Author: Jae-Jae Spoon
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2011-08-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472117904

Strategic choices allow small parties to balance their interests and achieve success

Political Survival

Political Survival
Author: Barry Ames
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1990-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780520069473

""Political Survival" is that rarest of books in comparative politics: a theoretically innovative work with an empirical, cross-national focus. Apart from its evident technical and conceptual polish, the book is a good read. "Political Survival" raises the ante in comparative studies of public policy by bringing sophisticated, systematic thinking to the analysis of decision-making in the Third World."--Peter McDonough, University of Michigan

Political Survival and Sovereignty in International Relations

Political Survival and Sovereignty in International Relations
Author: Jesse Dillon Savage
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-03-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108786677

Why do political actors willingly give up sovereignty to another state, or choose to resist, sometimes to the point of violence? Jesse Dillon Savage demonstrates the role that domestic politics plays in the formation of international hierarchies, and shows that when there are high levels of rent-seeking and political competition within the subordinate state, elites within this state become more prepared to accept hierarchy. In such an environment, members of society at large are also more likely to support the surrender of sovereignty. Empirically rich, the book adopts a comparative historical approach with an emphasis on Russian attempts to establish hierarchy in post-Soviet space, particularly in Georgia and Ukraine. This emphasis on post-Soviet hierarchy is complemented by a cross-national statistical study of hierarchy in the post WWII era, and three historical case studies examining European informal empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Survival

Survival
Author: Adam Y. Stern
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-03-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 081225287X

For a world mired in catastrophe, nothing could be more urgent than the question of survival. In this theoretically and methodologically groundbreaking book, Adam Y. Stern calls for a critical reevaluation of survival as a contemporary regime of representation. In Survival, Stern asks what texts, what institutions, and what traditions have made survival a recognizable element of our current political vocabulary. The book begins by suggesting that the interpretive key lies in the discursive prominence of "Jewish survival." Yet the Jewish example, he argues, is less a marker of Jewish history than an index of Christianity's impact on the modern, secular, political imagination. With this inversion, the book repositions Jewish survival as the supplemental effect and mask of a more capacious political theology of Christian survival. The argument proceeds by taking major moments in twentieth-century philosophy, theology, and political theory as occasions for collecting the scattered elements of survival's theological-political archive. Through readings of canonical texts by secular and Jewish thinkers—Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud—Stern shows that survival belongs to a history of debates about the sovereignty and subjection of Christ's body. Interrogating survival as a rhetorical formation, the book intervenes in discussions about biopolitics, secularism, political theology, and the philosophy of religion.

Power Grab

Power Grab
Author: Paasha Mahdavi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2020-04-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108478891

Explores how dictators maintain their grip on power by seizing control of oil, metals, and minerals production.

Survival of the Savvy

Survival of the Savvy
Author: Rick Brandon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2004-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0743262549

Discusses how to eliminate unethical behavior at the workplace, demonstrating how to master corporate politics ethically through an understanding of political styles and an application of strategies in such areas as networking and idea promotion.

Systems of Survival

Systems of Survival
Author: Jane Jacobs
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2016-08-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0525432884

With intelligence and clarity of observation, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities addresses the moral values that underpin working life. In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs identifies two distinct moral syndromes—one governing commerce, the other, politics—and explores what happens when these two syndromes collide. She looks at business fraud and criminal enterprise, government’s overextended subsidies to agriculture, and transit police who abuse the system the are supposed to enforce, and asks us to consider instances in which snobbery is a virtue and industry a vice. In this work of profound insight and elegance, Jacobs gives us a new way of seeing all our public transactions and encourages us towards the best use of our natural inclinations.

Political Survival in Pakistan

Political Survival in Pakistan
Author: Anas Malik
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 606
Release: 2010-10-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1136904182

Presenting a framework that incorporates macro-level forces into micro-level strategic calculations, this book explains key political choices by leaders and challengers in Pakistan through the political survival mechanism. It offers an explanation for continuing polity weakness in the country, and describes how political survival shapes the choices made by the leaders and challengers. Using a unique analysis that synthesizes theories of weak states, quasi-states and political survival, the book extends beyond rationalist accounts and the application of choice-theoretical approaches to developing countries. It challenges the focus on ideology and suggests that diverse, religiously and ethnically-defined affinity groups have interests that are represented in particular ways in weak state circumstances. Extensive interviews with decision-makers and polity-participants, combined with narrative accounts, allow the author to examine decision-making by leaders in a state bureaucratic machinery context as well as the complex mechanisms by which dissident affinity groups may support ‘quasi-state’ options. This study can be used for comparisons in Islamic contexts, and presents an interesting contribution to studies on South Asia as well as Political Development.