by Maxwell A. Cameron
Societies create rules that govern our practices. Such rules can only be effective, however, if the intermediaries between rules and practices–institutions–harness the skill, knowledge, and motivation of practitioners. Yet, everywhere institutions seem to be failing. Over-reliance on rules and incentives has not only corrupted the intrinsic motivations that arise from practice, it has also promoted the spread of competitive utility maximizing and thereby discouraged the kind of moral agency necessary for institutions to work well.
In Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom, Maxwell Cameron takes this basic insight as his starting point to argue that the rapid spread of the tenets of a neoliberal political-economic philosophy in our era has contributed to the erosion of institutional capacity. The book contributes to an emerging field of social science research grounded in the Aristotelian idea of phronesis, or practical wisdom. Drawing on a wide range of examples, Cameron not only shows how good institutions depend on wise practitioners, he argues that contemporary democratic institutions are being assaulted by excessive partisanship and the hollowing-out of democratic deliberation, by the corrupting effects of money in politics, and by the use of neoliberal techniques of governance that are designed to foster competition rather than the pursuit of common goods.
At once a valuable guide to designing effective institutions and a trenchant critique of contemporary institutional failure, Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom promises to reshape our understanding of one of the most basic building blocks of contemporary social and political life.
by Arjun Chowdhury
In February of 2011, Libyan citizens rebelled against Muammar Qaddafi and quickly unseated him. The speed of the regime’s collapse confounded many observers, and the ensuing civil war showed Foreign Policy’s index of failed states to be deeply flawed–FP had, in 2010, identified 110 states as being more likely than Libya to descend into chaos. They were spectacularly wrong, but this points to a larger error in conventional foreign policy wisdom: failed, or weak and unstable, states are not anomalies but are instead in the majority. More states resemble Libya than Sweden.
Why are most states weak and unstable? Taking as his launching point Charles Tilly’s famous dictum that ‘war made the state, and the state made war,’ Arjun Chowdhury argues that the problem lies in our mistaken equation of democracy and economic power with stability. But major wars are the true source of stability: only the existential crisis that such wars produced could lead citizens to willingly sacrifice the resources that allowed the state to build the capacity it needed for survival. Developing states in the postcolonial era never experienced the demands major interstate war placed on European states, and hence citizens in those nations have been unwilling to sacrifice the resources that would build state capacity. For example, India and Mexico are established democracies with large economies. Despite their indices of stability, both countries are far from stable: there is an active Maoist insurgency in almost a quarter of India’s districts, and Mexico is plagued by violence, drug trafficking, and high levels of corruption in local government. Nor are either effective at collecting revenue. As a consequence, they do not have the tax base necessary to perform the most fundamental tasks of modern states: controlling organized violence in a given territory and providing basic services to citizens. By this standard, the majority of states in the world–about two thirds–are weak states.
Chowdury maintains that an accurate evaluation of international security requires a normative shift : the language of weakness and failure belies the fact that strong states are exceptions. Chowdhury believes that dismantling this norm is crucial, as it encourages developing states to pursue state-building via war, which is an extremely costly approach–in terms of human lives and capital. Moreover, in our era, such an approach is destined to fail because the total wars of the past are highly unlikely to occur today. Just as importantly, the non-state alternatives on offer are not viable alternatives. For better or worse, we will continue to live in a state-dominated world where most states are weak. Counterintuitive and sweeping in its coverage, The Myth of International Order demands that we fundamentally rethink foundational concepts of international politics like political stability and state failure.
by Barbara Arneil
Modern colonization is generally defined as a process by which a state settles and dominates a foreign land and people. This book argues that through the nineteenth and into the first half of the twentieth centuries, thousands of domestic colonies were proposed and/or created by governments and civil society organizations for fellow citizensas opposed to foreigners and within their own borders rather than overseas. Such colonies sought to solve every social problem arising within industrializing and urbanizing states.
Domestic Colonies argues that colonization ought to be seen during this period as a domestic policy designed to solve social problems at home as well as foreign policy designed to expend imperial power. Three kind of domestic colonies are analysed in this book: labour colonies for the idle poor, farm colonies for the mentally ill and disabled, and utopian colonies for racial, religious, and political minorities. All of them were justified by an ideology of colonialism that argued if people were segregated in colonies located on empty land and engaged in agrarian labour, this would improve both the people and the land. Key domestic colonialists analysed in this book include Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Peter Kropotkin, Robert Owen, and Booker T. Washington. The turn inward to colony thus requires us to rethink the meaning and scope of colonization and colonialism in modern political theory and practice.
by Richard Johnston
The Canadian party system is a deviant case among the Anglo-American democracies. It has too many parties, it is susceptible to staggering swings from election to election, and its provincial and federal branches often seem unrelated. Unruly and inscrutable, it is a system that defies logic and classification – until now.
In this political science tour de force, Richard Johnston makes sense of the Canadian party system. With a keen eye for history and deft use of recently developed analytic tools, he articulates a series of propositions underpinning the system. Chief among them was domination by the centrist Liberals, stemming from their grip on Quebec, which blocked both the Conservatives and the NDP. As Johnston shows, the Conservative Party could win only with short-lived coalitions of francophobes and nationalist francophones, often built by soaking up populist tension. Moving beyond the national realm, he also takes a close look at the stunning discontinuity between federal and provincial arenas, another peculiarity of the Canadian system.
For its combination of historical breadth and data-intensive rigour, The Canadian Party System is a rare achievement. Its findings shed light on the main puzzles of the Canadian case, while contesting the received wisdom of the comparative study of parties, elections, and electoral systems elsewhere.
Edited by Barbara Arneil and Nancy J. Hirschmann (UPenn)
Though disability scholarship has been robust in history, philosophy, English, and sociology for decades, political theory and political science more generally have been slow to catch up. This groundbreaking volume presents the first full-length book on political theory approaches to disability issues. Barbara Arneil and Nancy J. Hirschmann bring together some of the leading scholars in political theory to provide a historical analysis of disability through the works of canonical figures, ranging from Hobbes and Locke to Kant, Rawls and Arendt, as well as an analysis of disability in contemporary political theory, examining key concepts, such as freedom, power and justice. Disability and Political Theory introduces a new disciplinary framework to disability studies, and provides a comprehensive introduction to a new topic of political theory.
- Disability is an exploding field in other disciplines, but has been virtually ignored by political theory and political science more broadly – this is the first volume to combine these fields
- Combines contemporary political theory with historical analysis
- Features contributions from leading experts in the joint fields of political theory and disability studies
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Edited By Mark Warren and Hilary Pearse
Is it possible to advance democracy by empowering ordinary citizens to make key decisions about the design of political institutions and policies? In 2004, the government of British Columbia embarked on a bold democratic experiment: it created an assembly of 160 near-randomly selected citizens to assess and redesign the province’s electoral system. The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly represents the first time a citizen body has had the power to reform fundamental political institutions. It was an innovative gamble that has been replicated elsewhere in Canada and in the Netherlands, and is gaining increasing attention in Europe as a democratic alternative for constitution-making and constitutional reform. In the USA, advocates view citizens’ assemblies as a means for reforming referendum processes. This book investigates the citizens’ assembly in British Columbia to test and refine key propositions of democratic theory and practice.
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by Richard Johnston and Campbell Sharman
Party systems, party organization. For too long, scholars researching in these two areas have worked in isolation. This book bridges the divide by bringing together leading political scientists from both traditions to examine the intersection of rules, society, and the organization of parties within party systems.
Blending theory and case studies, Parties and Party Systems builds upon the pioneering work of R. Kenneth Carty, whose ideas about brokerage politics have influenced a generation of scholars. The contributors explore four thematic pathways: How do parties work across lines of division in society? How do partisan teams hold together in the face of the centrifugal pressures that necessitate brokerage? How can parties withstand the complicated principal-agent relations that inevitably arise? And, how does the institutional context constrain a multitude of competing interests when it, itself, is quite fragile?
By providing new perspectives on parties as organizations that exist within political systems, this volume will provoke theoretical reconsideration, prompt further integrative thinking, and inspire future research at the political organization-system nexus.
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by Herman Bakvis (UVic), Gerald Baier and Douglas Brown (Queen’s)
Federalism – particularly in Canada – involves an ongoing contestation of interests, ideas, and identities. It is a contestation that sometimes clarifies but often obscures the nature of conflicts and the manner in which they are resolved. Recognizing the great degree of ambivalence associated with federalism, the authors provide students with the conceptual tools and basic knowledge of various governmental processes that will allow them to analyze and, if necessary, critique intergovernmental relations. Focusing on three areas – basic federal and intergovernmental structure; the constitutional and institutional framework of the federation; and ‘federal governance’ – Contested Federalism is an engaging and balanced treatment of federalism in Canada.
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Edited by Yves Tiberghien
Between 1995 and the present day, the world has undergone significant advances in international law, norms, and institutions. Progress was particularly intense in the fields of global environment, human security, cultural diversity, and human rights. This book reveals the key role played by the European Union, Japan, and Canada in this process.
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