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Housing, Land and Property Rights: Residential Justice, Conflict Zones and Climate Change (Routledge Research in Human Rights Law)
by Scott LeckieThis book explores various contemporary aspects of the growing field of housing, land and property (HLP) rights. HLP rights have undergone a major transformation in recent decades, but much remains to be done to bring their promise to the billions of people who have yet to access them. This work presents several innovative ways by which the entire field of HLP rights can be strengthened in support of those to whom they are promised by human rights laws. It outlines the author’s suggestions for creating a new World Restitution Agency, expanding our understanding of the term ‘internationally wrongful act’ to HLP crimes, the links between mine action and HLP rights in post-conflict societies and the need to include HLP issues in peace agreements. The book concludes with several chapters that outline suggestions for better addressing climate displacement, including the need for national climate land banks, the role of the courts and how to redistribute global wealth towards rehousing the millions set to be displaced from their homes and lands due to the effects of climate change. The volume will be essential reading for academics, researchers and policymakers working in the areas of international human rights law, housing, land and property issues, humanitarian issues and climate change.
Housing Market Dynamics in Africa
by Zekebweliwai F. Geh El-hadj M. Bah Issa FayeThis open access book utilizes new data to thoroughly analyze the main factors currently shaping the African housing market. Some of these factors include the supply and demand for housing finance, land tenure security issues, construction cost conundrum, infrastructure provision, and low-cost housing alternatives. Through detailed analysis, the authors investigate the political economy surrounding the continent’s housing market and the constraints that behind-the-scenes policy makers need to address in their attempts to provide affordable housing for the majority in need. With Africa’s urban population growing rapidly, this study highlights how broad demographic shifts and rapid urbanization are placing enormous pressure on the limited infrastructure in many cities and stretching the economic and social fabric of municipalities to their breaking point. But beyond providing a snapshot of the present conditions of the African housing market, the book offers recommendations and actionable measures for policy makers and other stakeholders on how best to provide affordable housing and alleviate Africa’s housing deficit. This work will be of particular interest to practitioners, non-governmental organizations, private sector actors, students and researchers of economic policy, international development, and urban development.
Housing Markets and Household Behavior in Japan (Advances in Japanese Business and Economics #19)
by Miki SekoThis book addresses essential questions about housing by building theoretical models based on various real world problems in Japan and testing these models using econometric methods. Almost all related empirical analyses use Japanese household longitudinal data. Accordingly, the author analyzes whole aspects of the data, based on an understanding of the actual situation, theory, and empirical analysis, to directly derive a vision of a future housing policy. Why are houses expensive and difficult to obtain in Japan? Why do people have to live in small houses? Why do people not relocate frequently? Why is the earthquake insurance subscription rate so low, particularly in an earthquake-prone country such as Japan, even after such a catastrophic event as the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011? How do existing housing finance and tax policies or laws relate to these real world problems? To answer these questions, the book clarifies the unique criteria that characterize housing problems in Japan and presents a vision of future housing policy. The short answer is that existing housing finance policy that adopts criteria based on the floor space of houses creates incentives for people to live in even smaller houses. Furthermore, the Japan Rental Act, which affects people renting homes, reduces residential mobility. The incidence of underinsurance against earthquake risk is a result of earthquake insurance market imperfections such as crude and rough geographical risk ratings. The book elaborates on these factors in four parts and will be of interest to all readers who are concerned with the housing market and household behavior in Japan.
Housing The New Russia
by Jane R. ZaviscaIn Housing the New Russia, Jane R. Zavisca examines Russia's attempts to transition from a socialist vision of housing, in which the government promised a separate, state-owned apartment for every family, to a market-based and mortgage-dependent model of home ownership. In 1992, the post-Soviet Russian government signed an agreement with the United States to create the Russian housing market. The vision of an American-style market guided housing policy over the next two decades. Privatization gave socialist housing to existing occupants, creating a nation of homeowners overnight. New financial institutions, modeled on the American mortgage system, laid the foundation for a market. Next the state tried to stimulate mortgages-and reverse the declining birth rate, another major concern-by subsidizing loans for young families. Imported housing institutions, however, failed to resonate with local conceptions of ownership, property, and rights. Most Russians reject mortgages, which they call "debt bondage," as an unjust "overpayment" for a good they consider to be a basic right. Instead of stimulating homeownership, privatization, combined with high prices and limited credit, created a system of "property without markets. " Frustrated aspirations and unjustified inequality led most Russians to call for a government-controlled housing market. Under the Soviet system, residents retained lifelong tenancy rights, perceiving the apartments they inhabited as their own. In the wake of privatization, young Russians can no longer count on the state to provide their house, nor can they afford to buy a home with wages, forcing many to live with extended family well into adulthood. Zavisca shows that the contradictions of housing policy are a significant factor in Russia's falling birth rates and the apparent failure of its pronatalist policies. These consequences further stack the deck against the likelihood that an affordable housing market will take off in the near future.
Housing Policy in the United States
by Alex F. SchwartzThe classic primer for its subject, Housing Policy in the United States, has been substantially revised in the wake of the 2007 near-collapse of the housing market and the nation’s recent signs of recovery. Like its previous editions, this standard volume offers a broad overview of the field, but expands to include new information on how the crisis has affected the nation’s housing challenges, and the extent to which the federal government has addressed them. Schwartz also includes the politics of austerity that has permeated almost all aspects of federal policymaking since the Congressional elections of 2010, new initiatives to rehabilitate public housing, and a new chapter on the foreclosure crisis. The latest available data on housing conditions, housing discrimination, housing finance, and programmatic expenditures is included, along with all new developments in federal housing policy. This book is the perfect foundational text for urban studies, urban planning, social policy, and housing policy courses.
Housing Policy in the United States
by Alex F. SchwartzThe fourth edition of Housing Policy in the United States refreshes its classic, foundational coverage of the field with new data, analysis, and comparative focus. This landmark volume offers a broad overview that synthesizes a wide range of material to highlight the significant problems, concepts, programs and debates that all defi ne the aims, challenges, and milestones within and involving housing policy. Expanded discussion in this edition centers on state and local activity to produce and preserve affordable housing, the impact and the implications of reduced fi nancial incentives for homeowners. Other features of this new edition include: • Analysis of the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 on housing- related tax expenditures; • Review of the state of fair housing programs in the wake of the Trump Administration’s rollback of several key programs and policies; • Cross- examination of U.S. housing policy and conditions in an international context. Featuring the latest available data on housing patterns and conditions, this is an excellent companion for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in urban studies, urban planning, sociology and social policy, and housing policy.
Housing Policy in the United States
by Alex F. SchwartzThe fourth edition of Housing Policy in the United States refreshes its classic, foundational coverage of the field with new data, analysis, and comparative focus. This landmark volume offers a broad overview that synthesizes a wide range of material to highlight the significant problems, concepts, programs and debates that all defi ne the aims, challenges, and milestones within and involving housing policy. Expanded discussion in this edition centers on state and local activity to produce and preserve affordable housing, the impact and the implications of reduced fi nancial incentives for homeowners.Other features of this new edition include:• Analysis of the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 on housing- related taxexpenditures;• Review of the state of fair housing programs in the wake of the Trump Administration’s rollbackof several key programs and policies;• Cross- examination of U.S. housing policy and conditions in an international context.Featuring the latest available data on housing patterns and conditions, this is an excellent companionfor graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in urban studies, urban planning, sociologyand social policy, and housing policy.
How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News: Exploring the Impacts of Social Media, Deepfakes, GPT-3, and More
by Noah GiansiracusaFrom deepfakes to GPT-3, deep learning is now powering a new assault on our ability to tell what’s real and what’s not, bringing a whole new algorithmic side to fake news. On the other hand, remarkable methods are being developed to help automate fact-checking and the detection of fake news and doctored media. Success in the modern business world requires you to understand these algorithmic currents, and to recognize the strengths, limits, and impacts of deep learning---especially when it comes to discerning the truth and differentiating fact from fiction. This book tells the stories of this algorithmic battle for the truth and how it impacts individuals and society at large. In doing so, it weaves together the human stories and what’s at stake here, a simplified technical background on how these algorithms work, and an accessible survey of the research literature exploring these various topics. How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News is an accessible, broad account of the various ways that data-driven algorithms have been distorting reality and rendering the truth harder to grasp. From news aggregators to Google searches to YouTube recommendations to Facebook news feeds, the way we obtain information today is filtered through the lens of tech giant algorithms. The way data is collected, labelled, and stored has a big impact on the machine learning algorithms that are trained on it, and this is a main source of algorithmic bias – which gets amplified in harmful data feedback loops. Don’t be afraid: with this book you’ll see the remedies and technical solutions that are being applied to oppose these harmful trends. There is hope.What You Will LearnThe ways that data labeling and storage impact machine learning and how feedback loops can occurThe history and inner-workings of YouTube’s recommendation algorithmThe state-of-the-art capabilities of AI-powered text generation (GPT-3) and video synthesis/doctoring (deepfakes) and how these technologies have been used so farThe algorithmic tools available to help with automated fact-checking and truth-detectionWho This Book is ForPeople who don’t have a technical background (in data, computers, etc.) but who would like to learn how algorithms impact society; business leaders who want to know the powers and perils of relying on artificial intelligence. A secondary audience is people with a technical background who want to explore the larger social and societal impact of their work.
How and Why to Regulate False Political Advertising in Australia
by Lisa Hill Max Douglass Ravi BaltutisThis open access book represents the first comprehensive, Australia-focused treatment of the problem of false election information disseminated for the purpose of gaining an electoral advantage. It explores cautious legal regulation as the most effective and decisive approach to the issue. In doing so, the book demonstrates that, although experiments with such remedies have met with mixed success elsewhere, they are nevertheless viable, especially in Australia where they have strong public support and are able to withstand constitutional challenge.
How Are We to Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest
by Peter Singerrefutes the idea that humans are by nature selfish; powerful call to live an ethical life.
How Autocrats Abuse Power: Resistance to Trump and Trumpism (Defending American Democracy)
by Richard L. AbelChronicling and analyzing resistance to the threat that autocracy poses to American liberal democracy, this book provides the definitive account of both Trump’s efforts to erode democracy’s essential elements and opposition to those efforts. This book is about the threat of autocracy, which antedated Donald Trump and will persist after he leaves the stage. Autocrats blur or breach the separation of powers, use executive orders to bypass the legislature, pack the courts, replace career prosecutors with political appointees, abuse the pardon power, and claim immunity from the law. They seek to hobble opposition from civil society by curtailing speech and assembly, tolerating and even encouraging vigilante violence, and attacking the media. As this book demonstrates, Trump followed the autocrat’s playbook in many ways. He was a huckster of hate, aiming his vitriol at women and racial minorities and making attacks on immigrants the focus of his 2016 campaign, as well as his first years in office. Nevertheless, his rhetoric and policies encountered widespread opposition—from religious leaders, business executives, lawyers and bar associations, and civil servants. His executive orders (on which he relied) were almost all struck down by courts: including the first two “Muslim bans,” the detention of children and their separation from parents, the diversion of military funds to build the border wall, the insertion of a citizenship question in the census, and the limits on asylum. Just as Trump sought to weaponize the criminal justice system against his political opponents, so he manipulated it to defend his cronies, derailing some of their prosecutions. Trump also intervened in courts martial and criminal prosecutions of those convicted of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq and those accused of desertion and terrorism. Again, however, there was resistance, as some career prosecutors withdrew from cases or resigned when subjected to political pressure and federal courts convicted all of Trump’s allies—even though the president went on to use his unreviewable pardon power. This book, then, documents the abuses that are characteristic of autocracy and assesses the various forms of resistance to them. This definitive account and analysis of Trumpism in action, as well as the resistance to it, will appeal to scholars, students, and others with interests in politics, populism, and the rule of law and, more specifically, to those concerned with resisting the threat that autocracy poses to liberal democracy.
How Autocrats Attack Expertise: Resistance to Trump and Trumpism (Defending American Democracy)
by Richard L. AbelChronicling and analyzing resistance to the threat that autocracy poses to American liberal democracy, this book provides the definitive account of Trump’s assault on truth and his populist attacks on expertise, as well as scientific and legal opposition to them. This book is about the threat of autocracy, which antedated Donald Trump and will persist after he leaves the stage. Pandering to populists, autocrats attack professional expertise in an Orwellian world, where “ignorance is strength” and where, as Hannah Arendt wrote, people “believe everything and nothing.” Trump sought to inflame xenophobia by blaming China for the pandemic and closing U.S. borders, then declaring victory and, when that proved premature, wrongly blaming the number of tests for escalating cases. He sought to muzzle government scientists and denounced those who defied or evaded his directives as members of the “deep state,” preferring to rely on inexpert buddies. He elevated obscure scientists who promoted quack cures and opposed effective preventive measures while sidelining the few reputable experts, who nevertheless courageously resisted political interference. In addition to these, as this book documents, independent scientists, scientific journals and professional associations also outspoken, often more so. Even the pharmaceutical industry sought to preserve the integrity of a federal bureaucracy that assured the public the drugs they consumed were safe and efficacious. Following Trump’s numerous efforts to distort and undermine expertise, this book describes and evaluates the resilience of scientific and legal defenses of truth. This definitive account and analysis of the Trump’s populist rejection of truth and expertise will appeal to scholars, students and others with interests in politics, populism and the rule of law and, more specifically, to those concerned with resisting the threat that autocracy poses to liberal democracy.
How Autocrats Seek Power: Resistance to Trump and Trumpism (Defending American Democracy)
by Richard L. AbelChronicling and analyzing resistance to the threat that autocracy poses to American liberal democracy, this book provides the definitive account of the rise of Trump’s populist support in 2016, and his failed efforts to nullify the result of the 2020 election.This book is about the threat of autocracy, which antedated Donald Trump and will persist after he leaves the stage. Autocracy negates both liberalism—which includes the protection of fundamental rights, the rule of law, separation of powers, and respect for specialist expertise—and democracy—which requires that the state be responsible to an electorate composed of all eligible voters—by concentrating unconstrained power in a single individual. Anticipating defeat in the 2016 election, Trump attacked suggestions that he had sought, or even benefited from, Russian assistance despite the evidence, and he made repeated claims of election fraud. In 2020, fearful that his mishandling of the pandemic had alienated voters, he intensified the allegations of fraud, demanding recounts, pressuring state legislatures and state election officials, advancing bizarre conspiracy theories, and finally, calling for a massive demonstration, urging protesters to march to the Capitol to pressure Congress, promising to accompany them. But as this book documents, Trump’s efforts to nullify the result of the 2020 election failed. As the courts rejected his numerous challenges, state election officials loyally performed their statutory duties, the Justice Department found no evidence of fraud, and politicians from all sides certified Biden’s victory, this book traces the many, and varied, forms of the defense of liberal democracy located within both the state and civil society, including law (judges, government lawyers, and private practitioners), the media, NGOs, science (and other forms of expertise), and civil servants (in federal, state, and local government). Evaluating their efficacy, the book maintains, is vital if—as history has repeatedly taught us—the price of liberal democracy, like that of liberty itself, is eternal vigilance.This definitive account and analysis of Trumpism and the resistance to it will appeal to scholars, students, and others with interests in politics, populism, and the rule of law and, more specifically, to those concerned with resisting the threat that autocracy poses to liberal democracy.
How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation—and How to Strike Back
by Ariel Ezrachi Maurice E. StuckeTwo market experts deconstruct the drivers and inhibitors to innovation in the digital economy, explain how large tech companies can stifle disruption, assess the toll of their technologies on our well-being and democracy, and outline policy changes to take power away from big tech and return it to entrepreneurs.Silicon Valley’s genius combined with limited corporate regulation promised a new age of technological innovation in which entrepreneurs would create companies that would in turn fuel unprecedented job growth. Yet disruptive innovation has stagnated even as the five leading tech giants, which account for approximately 25 percent of the S&P 500’s market capitalization, are expanding to unimaginable scale and power. In How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation—and How to Strike Back, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke explain why this is happening and what we can do to reverse it.While many distrust the Big-Tech Barons, the prevailing belief is that innovation is thriving online. It isn’t. Rather than disruptive innovations that create significant value, we are getting technologies that primarily extract value and reduce well-being. Using vivid examples and relying on their work in the field, the authors explain how the leading tech companies design their sprawling ecosystems to extract more profits (while crushing any entrepreneur that poses a threat). As a result, we get less innovation that benefits us and more innovations that surpass the dreams of yesteryears’ autocracies. The Tech Barons’ technologies, which seek to decode our emotions and thoughts to better manipulate our behavior, are undermining political stability and democracy while fueling tribalism and hate.But it’s not hopeless. The authors reveal that sustained innovation scales with cities not companies, and that we, as a society, should profoundly alter our investment strategy and priorities to certain entrepreneurs (“Tech Pirates”) and cities’ infrastructure.
How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World
by Dambisa MoyoA New York Times bestselling author and veteran board member offers an insider's view of corporate boards, their struggles, and why they must adapt to survive. Corporate boards are under great pressure. Scandals and malpractice at companies like Theranos, WeWork, Uber, and Wells Fargo have raised justified questions among regulators, shareholders, and the public about the quality of corporate governance. In How Boards Work, prizewinning economist and veteran board director Dambisa Moyo offers an insider's view of corporate boards as they are buffeted by the turbulence of our times. Moyo argues that corporations need boards that are more transparent, more knowledgeable, more diverse, and more deeply involved in setting the strategic course of the companies they lead. How Boards Work offers a road map for how boards can steer companies through tomorrow's challenges and ensure they thrive to benefit their employees, shareholders, and society at large.
How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World
by Dambisa Moyo'Highly instructive . . . provides thoughtful analysis' Financial Times'Exactly what any prospective-or sitting-board member needs' Arianna Huffington'A must read . . . highly engaging . . . an indispensable guide to how boards function, malfunction, and, most importantly, should operate better' Mohamed A. El-ErianCorporate boards are under great pressure. Scandals and malpractice at companies like GE, Theranos and WeWork have raised justified questions among regulators, shareholders, and the public about the quality of corporate governance. Boards face ever-louder demands to weigh in on questions of climate change, racial and gender equity, data privacy, and other social issues that range far beyond their traditional mandate: choosing the CEO and endorsing corporate strategy.In HOW BOARDS WORK, prizewinning economist, veteran board director, and bestselling author Dambisa Moyo offers an insider's view of corporate boards as they are buffeted by the turbulence of our times. Drawing on her decade of experience serving on corporate boards, Moyo lays out what it is that boards actually do, and she outlines how they must adapt to survive the challenges of coming years. Corporations need boards that are more transparent, more knowledgeable, more diverse, and more deeply involved in setting the strategic course of the companies they lead.HOW BOARDS WORK is an urgent road map for how boards can steer companies through tomorrow's challenges and ensure they thrive to benefit their employees, shareholders, and society at large.
How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World
by Dambisa Moyo'Highly instructive . . . provides thoughtful analysis' Financial Times'Exactly what any prospective-or sitting-board member needs' Arianna Huffington'A must read . . . highly engaging . . . an indispensable guide to how boards function, malfunction, and, most importantly, should operate better' Mohamed A. El-ErianCorporate boards are under great pressure. Scandals and malpractice at companies like GE, Theranos and WeWork have raised justified questions among regulators, shareholders, and the public about the quality of corporate governance. Boards face ever-louder demands to weigh in on questions of climate change, racial and gender equity, data privacy, and other social issues that range far beyond their traditional mandate: choosing the CEO and endorsing corporate strategy.In HOW BOARDS WORK, prizewinning economist, veteran board director, and bestselling author Dambisa Moyo offers an insider's view of corporate boards as they are buffeted by the turbulence of our times. Drawing on her decade of experience serving on corporate boards, Moyo lays out what it is that boards actually do, and she outlines how they must adapt to survive the challenges of coming years. Corporations need boards that are more transparent, more knowledgeable, more diverse, and more deeply involved in setting the strategic course of the companies they lead.HOW BOARDS WORK is an urgent road map for how boards can steer companies through tomorrow's challenges and ensure they thrive to benefit their employees, shareholders, and society at large.
How Can You Represent Those People?
by Abbe Smith Monroe H. FreedmanHow Can You Represent Those People? is the first-ever collection of essays offering a response to the 'Cocktail Party Question' asked of every criminal lawyer. Contributors include prominent lawyers and rising stars, each offering a different often very personal perspective on the Question. Many share stories comic and tragic, inspiring and heartbreaking about criminal defense. Contributors include public defenders, capital defenders, prisoners' rights lawyers, and academics. Essays discuss clients ranging widely from 'ordinary' indigent defendants to alleged terrorists. This is a fascinating collection, a must-read for anyone interested in race, poverty, crime, punishment, and what makes lawyers tick. "
How CEOs Can Fix Capitalism
by Raymond V. Gilmartin Steven E. ProkeschThe financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession caused a crisis of public confidence in business and American-style capitalism, with its focus on maximizing shareholder value. Corporate leaders understood that reform was needed and that they needed to commit themselves to the dual goal of producing benefits for society and their firms' bottom lines-to creating "shared value." But the specific actions they could take to bring about this change were less clear. This ebook offers some of the freshest thinking today on practical measures that businesses can implement to create shared value. Originally published in an online forum hosted by Harvard Business Review, it offers valuable advice about how CEOs, other senior executives, and boards of directors can work together to engage stakeholders in new ways, change their companies' values, build healthier relationships with investors, revamp incentive systems to create long-term value, and develop stronger succession plans.The authors of this collection of short articles include current or former CEOs, such as Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Dominic Barton of McKinsey & Company, and an array of prominent academics and other thought leaders, including Roger Martin of the University of Toronto, Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford, and Alfred Rappaport of Northwestern.Its editors are Raymond Gilmartin, the former CEO of Merck and, until recently, an adjunct professor at Harvard Business School, and Steve Prokesch, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review who previously worked at the New York Times and BusinessWeek magazine. In their introduction, they offer five specific recommendations on how CEOs can restore public faith in capitalism.HBR Singles provide brief yet potent business ideas, in digital form, for today's thinking professional.
How Civic Action Works: Fighting for Housing in Los Angeles (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology #9)
by Paul LichtermanThe ways that social advocates organize to fight unaffordable housing and homelessness in Los Angeles, illuminated by a new conceptual framework for studying collective actionHow Civic Action Works renews the tradition of inquiry into collective, social problem solving. Paul Lichterman follows grassroots activists, nonprofit organization staff, and community service volunteers in three coalitions and twelve organizations in Los Angeles as they campaign for affordable housing, develop new housing, or address homelessness. Lichterman shows that to understand how social advocates build their campaigns, craft claims, and choose goals, we need to move beyond well-established thinking about what is strategic.Lichterman presents a pragmatist-inspired sociological framework that illuminates core tasks of social problem solving, both contentious and noncontentious, by grassroots and professional advocates alike. He reveals that advocates’ distinct styles of collective action produce different understandings of what is strategic, and generate different dilemmas for advocates because each style accommodates varying social and institutional pressures. We see, too, how patterns of interaction create a cultural filter that welcomes some claims about housing problems while subordinating or delegitimating others. These cultural patterns help solve conceptual and practical puzzles, such as why coalitions fragment when members agree on many things, and what makes advocacy campaigns separate housing from homelessness or affordability from environmental sustainability. Lichterman concludes by turning this action-centered framework toward improving dialogue between social advocates and researchers.Using extensive ethnography enriched by archival evidence, How Civic Action Works explains how advocates meet the relational and rhetorical challenges of collective action.
How Civility Works
by Keith BybeeIs civility dead? Americans ask this question every election season, but their concern is hardly limited to political campaigns. Doubts about civility regularly arise in just about every aspect of American public life. Rudeness runs rampant. Our news media is saturated with aggressive bluster and vitriol. Our digital platforms teem with expressions of disrespect and trolls. Reflecting these conditions, surveys show that a significant majority of Americans believe we are living in an age of unusual anger and discord. Everywhere we look, there seems to be conflict and hostility, with shared respect and consideration nowhere to be found. In a country that encourages thick skins and speaking one's mind, is civility even possible, let alone desirable? In How Civility Works, Keith J. Bybee elegantly explores the "crisis" in civility, looking closely at how civility intertwines with our long history of boorish behavior and the ongoing quest for pleasant company. Bybee argues that the very features that make civility ineffective and undesirable also point to civility's power and appeal. Can we all get along? If we live by the contradictions on which civility depends, then yes, we can, and yes, we should.
How Democracy Ends
by David RuncimanHow will democracy end? And what will replace it? A preeminent political scientist examines the past, present, and future of an endangered political philosophySince the end of World War II, democracy's sweep across the globe seemed inexorable. Yet today, it seems radically imperiled, even in some of the world's most stable democracies. How bad could things get?In How Democracy Ends, David Runciman argues that we are trapped in outdated twentieth-century ideas of democratic failure. By fixating on coups and violence, we are focusing on the wrong threats. Our societies are too affluent, too elderly, and too networked to fall apart as they did in the past. We need new ways of thinking the unthinkable--a twenty-first-century vision of the end of democracy, and whether its collapse might allow us to move forward to something better.A provocative book by a major political philosopher, How Democracy Ends asks the most trenchant questions that underlie the disturbing patterns of our contemporary political life.
How Democratic Is the American Constitution?
by Robert A. DahlDahl starts with the assumption that the legitimacy of the American Constitution derives solely from its utility as an instrument of democratic governance. Dahl demonstrates that, due to the context in which it was conceived, our Constitution came to incorporate significant antidemocratic elements. Because the Framers of the Constitution had no relevant example of a democratic political system on which to model the American government, many defining aspects of our political system were implemented as a result of short-sightedness or last-minute compromise.
How Failed Attempts to Amend the Constitution Mobilize Political Change
by Roger C. HartleySince the Constitution's ratification, members of Congress, following Article V, have proposed approximately twelve thousand amendments, and states have filed several hundred petitions with Congress for the convening of a constitutional convention. Only twenty-seven amendments have been approved in 225 years. Why do members of Congress continue to introduce amendments at a pace of almost two hundred a year?This book is a demonstration of how social reformers and politicians have used the amendment process to achieve favorable political results even as their proposed amendments have failed to be adopted. For example, the ERA "failed" in the sense that it was never ratified, but the mobilization to ratify the ERA helped build the feminist movement (and also sparked a countermobilization). Similarly, the Supreme Court's ban on compulsory school prayer led to a barrage of proposed amendments to reverse the Court. They failed to achieve the requisite two-thirds support from Congress, but nevertheless had an impact on the political landscape. The definition of the relationship between Congress and the President in the conduct of foreign policy can also be traced directly to failed efforts to amend the Constitution during the Cold War.Roger Hartley examines familiar examples like the ERA, balanced budget amendment proposals, and pro-life attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade, but also takes the reader on a three-century tour of lesser-known amendments. He explains how often the mere threat of calling a constitutional convention (at which anything could happen) effected political change.
How Failed Attempts to Amend the Constitution Mobilize Political Change
by Roger C. HartleySince the Constitution's ratification, members of Congress, following Article V, have proposed approximately twelve thousand amendments, and states have filed several hundred petitions with Congress for the convening of a constitutional convention. Only twenty-seven amendments have been approved in 225 years. Why do members of Congress continue to introduce amendments at a pace of almost two hundred a year? This book is a demonstration of how social reformers and politicians have used the amendment process to achieve favorable political results even as their proposed amendments have failed to be adopted. For example, the ERA "failed" in the sense that it was never ratified, but the mobilization to ratify the ERA helped build the feminist movement (and also sparked a countermobilization). Similarly, the Supreme Court's ban on compulsory school prayer led to a barrage of proposed amendments to reverse the Court. They failed to achieve the requisite two-thirds support from Congress, but nevertheless had an impact on the political landscape. The definition of the relationship between Congress and the President in the conduct of foreign policy can also be traced directly to failed efforts to amend the Constitution during the Cold War. Roger Hartley examines familiar examples like the ERA, balanced budget amendment proposals, and pro-life attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade, but also takes the reader on a three-century tour of lesser-known amendments. He explains how often the mere threat of calling a constitutional convention (at which anything could happen) effected political change.