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This book asks what distinguishes peaceful plural democracies from violent ones and what distinguishes violent ethnic groups from peaceful ones within the same democracy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it suggests that ethnic groups and their political demands are not inherently intransigent and that violence is not a necessary corollary of ethnic politics. The book posits that ethnic identity serves as a stable but flexible information shortcut for political choices, influencing party formation and development in new and maturing democracies. It furthermore argues that political intransigence and violence expressed by some ethnic groups stem from circumstances exogenous to ethnic affiliations. In particular, absolute restrictions on ethnic access to the executive produce conditions under which ethnic group incentive to participate in peaceful electoral politics is eliminated. A number of case studies and statistical analysis of all electoral democracies since 1945 are used to test and support the formal argument.
The Quality of Divided Democracies contemplates how democracy works, or fails to work, in ethnoculturally divided societies. It advances a new theoretical approach to assessing quality of democracy in divided societies, and puts it into practice with the focused comparison of two divided democracies—Estonia and Latvia. The book uses rich comparative data to tackle the vital questions of what determines a democracy’s level of inclusiveness and the ways in which minorities can gain access to the policy-making process. It uncovers a “presence–polarization dilemma” for minorities’ inclusion in the democratic process, which has implications for academic debates on minority representation and ethnic politics, as well as practical implications for international and national institutions’ promotion of minority rights.
Beth Simmons demonstrates through a combination of statistical analysis and case studies that the ratification of treaties generally leads to better human rights practices. She argues that international human rights law should get more practical and rhetorical support from the international community as a supplement to broader efforts to address conflict, development, and democratization.
Ethnicity and ethnic parties have often been portrayed as a threat to political stability. This book challenges the notion that the organization of politics in heterogeneous societies should overcome ethnicity. Rather, descriptive representation of ethnic groups has potential to increase regime support and reduce conflict.
A ground-breaking study on how natural disasters can escalate or defuse wars, insurgencies, and other strife. Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been higher. At the same time, natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity over the past two decades, their impacts worsened by climate change, urbanization, and persistent social and economic inequalities. Providing the first comprehensive analysis of the interplay between natural disasters and armed conflict, Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints explores the extent to which disasters facilitate the escalation or aba...
The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology offers a comprehensive and contemporary look at this evolving field of study. The focus is on political life itself and the chapters, written by a highly-respected and international team of authors, cover the core themes which need to be understood in order to study political life from a sociological perspective, or simply to understand the political world. The two volumes are structured around five key areas: PART 1: TRADITIONS AND PERSPECTIVES PART 2: CORE CONCEPTS PART 03: POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES AND MOVEMENTS PART 04: TOPICS PART 05: WORLD REGIONS This future-oriented and cross-disciplinary handbook is a landmark text for students and scholars interested in the social investigation of politics.
Since 2008, prominent members of the Lhomwe ethnic group - a large but politically marginalized community in Malawi - have waged an aggressive campaign to revive their lost cultural heritage, including their language, names, foods, and dances. Existing research has linked such processes of “inventing tradition” to the strategic actions of political elites who benefit from mobilizing members of marginalized ethnic communities for political ends. Yet, because existing research has focused primarily on elite incentives, we know less about how such elite-led efforts translate into lasting cultural change and active political support among regular people. The Political Logic of Cultural Reviv...
This fully revised edition offers a comprehensive overview of the many theories of religion and politics and provides students with an accessible, in-depth guide to the subject’s most significant debates, issues, and methodologies. It begins by asking the basic questions of how social scientists see religion and why religion remains relevant to politics in the modern era. Fox examines the influence of religious identity, beliefs, institutions and legitimacy on politics, and surveys important approaches and issues found in the literature on religion and politics. Four new chapters on religious policy around the world, political secularism, and religious freedom and human rights have been added to fully revised content covering religious identity, rational choice approaches to religious politics worldviews, beliefs, doctrines, ideologies, institutions and political mobilization, fundamentalism, secularization, and religion and conflict. This work will be essential reading for all students of religion and politics, comparative politics, international relations, and security studies.
Bringing together scholars of inequality, both inside and outside of Asia, this book examines how the distribution of income has affected political institutions, representation, and behaviour in Asia. Through detailed data analysis, the international team of contributors engages with the existing literature, arguing that the connection between inequality and political institutions is much more complex than has been suggested by previous studies from outside the region. Instead, Inequality and Democratic Politics in East Asia demonstrates that the micro-level evidence for the correlation between inequality and democracy is mixed and the impact of distributive politics is conditioned not only by institutional but also by historical and geopolitical factors. As such, this volume suggests that the median voter theorem and simplified partisan models prove to be ineffectual in accounting for distributive politics in East Asia. Analysing history, structure, and context to further understand the politics of inequality in East Asia, this book will be invaluable to students of Asian politics, as well as students of inequality, democracy, and political economy more widely.
Ethnicity is one of the most salient and enduring topics of social science, not least with regard to its potential link to political conflict/violence. Despite, or perhaps because of, the concept’s significant use, all too seldom has the field paused to consider the state of our knowledge. For example, how do we define and conceive of ethnicity within the context of political conflict? What do we really know about the causal determinants of ethnic conflict? What has been the most useful development within this literature, and why? This volume comprises reflections from an international range of prominent political scientists all engaged in the study of ethnicity and conflict/violence. They attempt to synthesize what the field does and does not know with regard to ethnic conflict, as well as draw out the research directions for the immediate future in unique and interesting ways. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Ethnopolitics.