Democracy 2021 Library Resources

The COVID-19 virus outbreak has rocked the world and it is widely accepted that there can be no return to the pre-pandemic society of 2019. However, many suggestions for the future of society and the planet are aimed at national governments, international bodies and society in general. Drawing on a decade of research by an internationally renowned expert, this book focuses on how cities and communities can lead the way in developing recovery strategies that promote social, economic and environmental justice. It offers new thinking tools for civic leaders and activists as well as practical suggestions on how we can co-create a more inclusive post COVID-19 future for us all.

In a gripping, accessible narrative, a veteran science journalist lays out the shocking story of how the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic happened and how to make sure this never happens again.

This contributed volume reflects on the collective wisdom and ongoing efforts of the social work profession that has been in the forefront of the global pandemic of COVID-19. The contributors are seasoned social work academics, practitioners, administrators, and researchers. Working on the frontlines with patients and families, these social workers have garnered experiences and insights, and also have developed innovative ways to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus on the psychosocial well-being of their clients and themselves.

This book tries to understand the lessons we ought to learn from the Covid-19 crisis as well as the profound transformations this pandemic will bring to the world order. These essays explore the challenge that the pandemic poses to liberalism, the unique potential this crisis offers us to retake control over globalization, and how it foreshadows future conflicts, especially the dynamic between China and the West. This timely book will be of interest to scholars in Political Science and Philosophy, as well as to general readers interested in what the post Covid-19 world may resemble.

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit at a time when the future and legitimacy of the institutions, principles, and practices of the international system are already under grave stress. This moment of crisis and uncertainty demands an act of imagination and provides an opportunity to boldly reimagine our future. The contributors to this interdisciplinary edited collection ponder what the consequences of the pandemic will be for the future world order and what steps we can take to secure more peace and prosperity for the nation and the world.

American Democracy Now transforms the Government course through innovative, adaptive technology that makes government relevant to today's students. The Then, Now, Next framework provides contemporary examples and historical context that challenge students to think critically about how the American Democracy will continue to evolve.

InThe American Revelation, Neil Baldwin, one of our most exciting and provocative intellectual historians, applies his formidable energies to the story of how the American Spirit developed over four centuries, through an inspiring--and unsparing--examination of selected ideals that have helped inform our culture through the vivid personalities who set the course. Figures both familiar and forgotten illuminate this timely narrative of popular history that enlivens the current debate about America's proper role in a turbulent post-9/11 world. Though an ideal may have been forgotten, that does not mean it no longer has the power to move us and shape our future.

In Democracy: A History, political theorist John Dunn sets out to explain the extraordinary presence of democracy in today's world. The story begins in Greece, where democracy started as an improvised remedy for a very local difficulty twenty-five hundred years ago. Athens gave democracy a name (demokratia) and worked out an elaborate, highly distinctive, and astonishingly thorough interpretation of the political conditions required to achieve it. However, democracy's tenure was short-lived, flourishing briefly and then fading away almost everywhere for nearly two thousand years. Democracy reappeared with the founding of the new American republic and amid the struggles of the French Revolution.

"Fake news," wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies--citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way. The problem may be novel in some of its details--including the role of today's political leaders, along with broadcast and digital media, in intensifying the epistemic anarchy--but the challenge of determining truth in a democratic world has a backstory. In this lively and illuminating book, historian Sophia Rosenfeld explores a longstanding and largely unspoken tension at the heart of democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite made up of trusted experts.

Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided.

Explores the threats to democracy that exist both in the United States and in the Middle East, discussing the corruption that plagues our own democracy, the failure to foster peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and other crises.

March 2015 should have been a time of celebration for Brazil, as it marked thirty years of democracy, a newfound global prominence, over a decade of rising economic prosperity, and stable party politics under the rule of the widely admired PT (Workers' Party). Instead, the country descended into protest, economic crisis, impeachment, and deep political division. Democratic Brazil Divided offers a comprehensive and nuanced portrayal of long-standing problems that contributed to the emergence of crisis and offers insights into the ways Brazilian democracy has performed well, despite the explosion of crisis.

This powerful and honest book uncovers how we can flip the system, building a more democratic, equitable, and cohesive society where teacher expertise drives solutions to education challenges. Editor Michael Soskil brings together a team of diverse voices to highlight solutions, spark positive change, and show us the path forward towards a more civil and more peaceful America.

This brief text offers an unbiased reflection on debates about neoliberalism and its alternatives in Latin America with an emphasis on the institutional puzzle that underlies the region's difficulties with democratization and development.

A unique combination of two major approaches, this reader is separated into two parts. Part I focuses on four central themes: democratization, economic development, social policy, and changing political actors. Each chapter in this follows a debate format, with complementary readings. Part II features six chapters focusing on particular countries or regions within Latin America, examining how the central themes discussed in Part I play out in each particular case.

Most Americans take for granted their right to vote, whether they choose to exercise it or not. But the history of suffrage in the U.S. is, in fact,the story of a struggle to achieve this right by our society's marginalized groups. In The Right to Vote, Duke historian Alexander Keyssar explores the evolution of suffrage over the course of the nation's history.

Examines how uncertainty regarding changing economic conditions, dramatic national events, and U.S. international interventions influences people's decisions whether to vote or not. Using rigorous statistical tools and rich historical stories, the authors test this theory on aggregate nonvoting patterns in the US across presidential and midterm elections from 1920 to 2012. They challenge the stereotype of nonvoters as poor, uneducated and apathetic and show that nonvoters are, by and large, as politically knowledgeable as voters, but see no difference between candidates or view them negatively.

Voting rights are a perennial topic in American politics. Recent elections and the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down key enforcement provisions in the Voting Rights Act (VRA), have only placed further emphasis on the debate over voter disenfranchaisement. Ballot Blocked shows how the divergent trajectories of legislation, administration, and judicial interpretation in voting rights policymaking derive largely from efforts by conservative politicians to narrow the scope of federal enforcement while at the same time preserving their public reputations as supporters of racial equality and minority voting rights.

Candidates and Voters extends our understanding of voting, elections, and representation by elaborating a simple theory of voting choice based on voters' interest in policy and in the suitability of candidates to hold elective office ('leadership valence').

The updated edition of this book describes the role of gender in the American electoral process through the 2008 elections. It strikes a balance between highlighting the most important developments for women as voters and candidates in the 2008 elections and providing a deeper analysis of the ways that gender has helped shape electoral politics in the United States.

Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed.Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time. In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day. The act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet, fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power, with lawmakers devising new strategies to keep minorities out of the voting booth and with the Supreme Court declaring a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history,

Ruthless gerrymandering has given the GOP a long-term grip on Congress. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has eviscerated campaign finance laws, boosting candidates backed by big money. As reporter Zachary Roth reveals, a growing number of Republicans distrust the very idea of democracy-and they're doing everything they can to limit it. Roth unearths the deep historical roots of this anti-egalitarian worldview, and introduces us to its modern-day proponents- The GOP officials pushing to make it harder to cast a ballot. He travels from Rust Belt cities to southern towns to show us how these efforts are hurting the most vulnerable Americans and preventing progress on pressing issues.

It happens in America every four decades and it is about to happen again. America's demand for change in the 2008 election will cause another of our country's periodic political makeovers. This realignment, like all others before it, will result from the coming of age of a new generation of young Americans--the Millennial Generation--and the full emergence of the Internet-based communications technology that this generation uses so well.

Which get-out-the-vote efforts actually succeed in ethnoracial communities--and why? Analyzing the results from hundreds of original experiments, the authors of this book offer a persuasive new theory to explain why some methods work while others don't.

Chronicles the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the Supreme Court's landmark decision in 2013, Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 2 (2013), which allowed districts to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice. Focusing on the aftermath of Shelby, Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening details she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans as the nation gears up for the 2018 midterm elections

The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. For two decades Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, has explored a theory of the mind that differs substantially from the more "dispassionate" notions held by most cognitive psychologists, political scientists, and economists--and Democratic campaign strategists.

How we arrived in a post-truth era, when "alternative facts" replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence. Are we living in a post-truth world, where "alternative facts" replace actual facts and feelings have more weight than evidence? How did we get here? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Lee McIntyre traces the development of the post-truth phenomenon from science denial through the rise of "fake news," from our psychological blind spots to the public's retreat into "information silos."

Provides an authoritative assessment of how immigration is reshaping the politics of the nation. Using an array of data and analysis, the authors show that fears about immigration fundamentally influence white Americans' core political identities, policy preferences, and electoral choices, and that these concerns are at the heart of a large-scale defection of whites from the Democratic to the Republican Party. They demonstrate that this political backlash has disquieting implications for the future of race relations in America. White Americans' concerns about Latinos and immigration have led to support for policies that are less generous and more punitive and that conflict with the preferences of much of the immigrant population. Racial divisions in partisanship and voting, as the authors indicate, now outweigh divisions by class, age, gender, and other demographic measures.

Offers a current overview of the environmental inequities faced by poor and minority communities and the development of the grassroots movement working to address them.

From Flint, Michigan, to Standing Rock, North Dakota, minorities have found themselves losing the battle for clean resources and a healthy environment. This book provides a modern history of such environmental injustices in the United States and Canada.

A glance at international headlines shows a remarkable increase in higher temperatures, stronger winds, and drier lands- a trifecta for igniting wildfires like we've rarely seen before. This change is particularly noticeable in the northern forests of the United States and Canada. In Firestorm, journalist Edward Struzik visits scorched earth from Alaska to Maine, and introduces the scientists, firefighters, and resource managers making the case for a radically different approach to managing wildfire in the 21st century. Struzik weaves a heart-pumping narrative of science, economics, politics, and human determination and points to the ways that we, and the wilder inhabitants of the forests around our cities and towns, might yet flourish in an age of growing megafires.

This book explores women of color's grassroots leadership in organizations that are not singularly identified with feminism. Centered in New York City, Pushing Back brings an intersectional perspective to communities of color as it addresses injustices tied to domestic work, housing, and environmental policies and practices. Ariella Rotramel shows how activists respond to injustice and marginalization, documenting the ways people of color and the working class in the United States recognize identity as key to the roots of and solutions to injustices such as environmental racism and gentrification.

In Rooted in the Earth , environmental historian Dianne D. Glave overturns the stereotype that a meaningful attachment to nature and the outdoors is contrary to the black experience. In tracing the history of African Americans' relationship with the environment, emphasizing the unique preservation-conservation aspect of black environmentalism, and using her storytelling skills to re-create black naturalists of the past, Glave reclaims the African American heritage of the land.

A "powerful and indispensable" look at the devastating consequences of environmental racism (Gerald Markowitz) and what we can do to remedy its toxic effects on marginalized communities -- featuring a new preface on COVID-19 risk factors.

The book documents how Trump's rise to global celebrity and now political power is bound up with his use of media spectacle and how his use of authoritarian populism has created a mass movement beyond his presidency and a danger to the traditions of U.S. democracy as well as economic security and world peace.

After President Trump's election, BREXIT and the widespread rise of far-Right political parties, much public discussion has intensely focused on populism and authoritarianism. In the middle of the twentieth century, members of the early Frankfurt School prolifically studied and theorized fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany and the United States. In this volume, leading European and American scholars apply insights from the early Frankfurt School to present-day authoritarian populism, including the Trump phenomenon and related developments across the globe. his book is a major contribution towards deeper understanding of populism's resurgence in the age of digital capitalism.

A groundbreaking new historical analysis of how global capitalism and advanced democracies mutually support each other. It is a widespread view that democracy and the advanced nation-state are in crisis, weakened by globalization and undermined by global capitalism, in turn explaining rising inequality and mounting populism. This book, written by two of the world's leading political economists, argues this view is wrong: advanced democracies are resilient, and their enduring historical relationship with capitalism has been mutually beneficial.

In this "lively and entertaining" history of ideas New York Times editorial writer Binyamin Appelbaum tells the story of the people who sparked four decades of economic revolution. The Economists' Hour is a reckoning -- and a call for people to rewrite the rules of the market.

We are living through a period of dramatic political change - Brexit, the election of Trump, the rise of extreme right movements in Europe and elsewhere, the resurgence of nationalism and xenophobia and a concerted assault on the liberal values and ideals associated with cosmopolitanism and globalization. Suddenly we find ourselves in a world that few would have imagined possible just a few years ago, a world that seems to many to be a move backwards. How can we make sense of these dramatic developments and how should we respond to them? Are we witnessing a worldwide rejection of liberal democracy and its replacement by some kind of populist authoritarianism? This timely volume brings together some of the world's greatest minds to analyse and seek to understand the forces behind this 'great regression'. Writers from across disciplines and countries grapple with our current predicament, framing it in a broader historical context, discussing possible future trajectories and considering ways that we might combat this reactionary turn.

A groundbreaking account of how the dangerous alliance of right-wing plutocrats and populists threatens the very pillars of American democracy. We often assume that the Republican Party is divided between a tax-cutting old guard and a white-nationalist vanguard-and that with Donald Trump's ascendance, the upstarts are winning. Yet as New York Times best-selling authors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson demonstrate, plutocrats and populists are now effectively allies in an intensifying fight to lock in America's skyrocketing inequality. Conservative parties can always be expected to side with economic elites, but when faced with popular resistance, they usually allow for policies that benefit the working and middle classes. Yet today's Republicans are an anomaly. Not only are they doubling down on a truly radical, elite-benefitting economic agenda, but even once-respectable conservatives have turned to nativist appeals and racist dog whistles-and, increasingly, to assaults on democracy itself.

From the best-selling author of Saving Capitalism and The Common Good, an urgent analysis of how the "rigged" systems of American politics and power operate, how this status quo came to be, and how average citizens can enact change. Millions of Americans have lost confidence in our political and economic system. After years of stagnant wages, volatile job markets, and an unwillingness by those in power to deal with profound threats such as climate change, there is a mounting sense that the system is fixed, serving only those select few with enough money to secure a controlling stake. With the characteristic clarity and passion that has made him a central civil voice, Robert B. Reich shows how wealth and power have interacted to install an elite oligarchy, eviscerate the middle class, and undermine democracy. Reich exposes how those at the top propagate myths about meritocracy, national competitiveness, corporate social responsibility, and the "free market" to distract most Americans from their accumulation of extraordinary wealth, and power over the system. Instead of answering the call to civic duty, they have chosen to uphold self-serving policies that line their own pockets and benefit their bottom line.

From the author of On Tyranny comes a stunning new chronicle of the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe and America.