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Full Description
The second edition of this comprehensive introduction to politics remains an essential framework for assessing the health and workings of present-day democracy. The book explores how democratic processes bring public policy into line with popular, basically centrist, preferences. In helping explain its workings, it equips us to better defend democracy.
Applying newly integrated theories of democratic processes to contemporary developments such as the use of right-wing populism across the world, it is the first textbook to help readers develop and apply predictive explanations for themselves. In doing so, it provides straightforward practical tools for evaluating how current events impact on democratic procedures and processes.
Key features:
provides answers to key questions such as how much contemporary democracies have lost direction under the impact of populist parties, big business and international threats.
validated against statistical evidence and examples from across the world, it details more exactly when and how democracy goes wrong and how to put it right.
shows how to develop predictive explanations as a basis for action, thus strengthening democracy by understanding it better.
outlines - in easy-to-understand terms - the basic statistical approaches that drive empirically informed analysis.
in-text features include chapter summaries, reviews, key points, illustrative briefings, key concepts and project and essay suggestions, further reading.
Politics is an essential resource for students of political science hoping a rules-based global order, and of key interest to economics, public policy analysis and more broadly the social sciences.
Contents
1. Introduction: politics and policy - what do we want to explain and how? PART 1 - PROCESSES: elections alternate party-based governments with different preferences and priorities, thus bringing public policies into line with centrist majority preferences in the long run 2. Why politics? Making policies to provide public goods 3. How popular preferences develop 4. Measuring electoral preferences 5. Electors' policy thinking: from a joined-up left-right perspective to issue-by-issue reactions 6. Party policy thinking: framing policy targets and estimating majority preferences from elections 7. Matching public policy to popular preferences 8. Opening up to populists: Using alternation theory to analyse US Policy Representation 1952-2025 PART 2 - RULES: rules designate - but may misrepresent - majority preferences, thus biasing policy outcomes 9. Majority choice of policies: voting paradoxes and attempted solutions 10. General elections and election systems: finalizing the collective choice of policies PART 3 - PROTAGONISTS: parties and governments shape popular preferences and reflect them in public policies 11. Citizens, parties and governments: interactive preference formation 12. Political parties: ideological policy carriers 13. Governments: prime participants in policymaking 14. Ministries: separating out policy areas PART 4 - STATES: collective action without binding rules 15. Globalization and world democracy 16. Challenges to a rule-based international order PART 5 - EXPLANATION: explaining politics by specifying its processes more exactly so as to predict outcomes 17. Generating 'Big Data': sources, procedures, error checks 18. Simplifying 'Big Data': dimensions, majorities and the (missing?) middle 19. Managing 'Big Data': theoretical explanation and statistical analysis 20. Developing political science by explaining democracy
