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Democratic Brazil
Actors, Institutions, and Processes
Peter Kingstone
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000

After 21 years of military rule, Brazil returned to democracy in 1985. Over the past decade and a half, Brazilians in the Nova República (New Republic) have struggled with a range of diverse challenges that have tested the durability and quality of the young democracy. How well have they succeeded? To what extent can we say that Brazilian democracy has consolidated? What actors, institutions, and processes have emerged as most salient over the past 15 years? Although Brazil is Latin America's largest country, the world's third largest democracy, and a country with a population and GNP larger than Yeltsin's Russia, more than a decade has passed since the last collaborative effort to examine regime change in Brazil, and no work in English has yet provided a comprehensive appraisal of Brazilian democracy in the period since 1985.

Democratic Brazil analyzes Brazilian democracy in a comprehensive, systematic fashion, covering the full period of the New Republic from Presidents Sarney to Cardoso. Democratic Brazil brings together twelve top scholars, the “next generation of Brazilianists,” with wide-ranging specialties including institutional analysis, state autonomy, federalism and decentralization, economic management and business-state relations, the military, the Catholic Church and the new religious pluralism, social movements, the left, regional integration, demographic change, and human rights and the rule of law. Each chapter focuses on a crucial process or actor in the New Republic, with emphasis on its relationship to democratic consolidation. The volume also contains a comprehensive bibliography on Brazilian politics and society since 1985. Prominent Brazilian historian Thomas Skidmore has contributed a foreword to the volume.

Democratic Brazil speaks to a wide audience, including Brazilianists, Latin Americanists generally, students of comparative democratization, as well as specialists within the various thematic subfields represented by the contributors. Written in a clear, accessible style, the book is ideally suited for use in upper-level undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on Latin American politics and development.

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The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil
Barry Ames
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Many countries have experimented with different electoral rules in order either to increase involvement in the political system or make it easier to form stable governments. Barry Ames explores this important topic in one of the world's most populous and important democracies, Brazil. This book locates one of the sources of Brazil's "crisis of governance" in the nation's unique electoral system, a system that produces a multiplicity of weak parties and individualistic, pork-oriented politicians with little accountability to citizens. It explains the government's difficulties in adopting innovative policies by examining electoral rules, cabinet formation, executive-legislative conflict, party discipline and legislative negotiation.
The book combines extensive use of new sources of data, ranging from historical and demographic analysis in focused comparisons of individual states to unique sources of data for the exploration of legislative politics. The discussion of party discipline in the Chamber of Deputies is the first multivariate model of party cooperation or defection in Latin America that includes measures of such important phenomena as constituency effects, pork-barrel receipts, ideology, electoral insecurity, and intention to seek reelection. With a unique data set and a sophisticated application of rational choice theory, Barry Ames demonstrates the effect of different electoral rules for election to Brazil's legislature.
The readership of this book includes anyone wanting to understand the crisis of democratic politics in Brazil. The book will be especially useful to scholars and students in the areas of comparative politics, Latin American politics, electoral analysis, and legislative studies.
Barry Ames is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Comparative Politics and Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh.
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The Brazilian Voter
Mass Politics in Democratic Transition, 1974–1986
Kurt von Mettenheim
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995
The dramatic transition from military to civilian rule in Brazil between 1974 and 1985 raises critical questions about voters, competitive party politics, and democracy at the end of the twentieth century.
    This book argues that whereas military government stifled democratic activity, public opinion quickly revived when the military liberalized electoral politics in 1974. Voters rapidly aligned themselves with parties for and against military government, acquired new views on major issues, judged leaders by their performance and policies, and grounded their beliefs in concepts of social justice. Kurt von Mettenheim examines how Brazilian voters make choices and cast their ballots runs counter to long-held liberal theories about how democracy works.
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The Chilean Senate
Internal Distribution of Influence
By Weston H. Agor
University of Texas Press, 1971

Weston Agor’s carefully documented analysis of the organization and workings of the Chilean Senate is the first of its kind and fills a long-standing need in the comparative study of the internal structure of legislative bodies.

Making eclectic use of role, power, and exchange theories, Agor bases his discussion on personal interviews with senators and staff as well as on extensive observation of the Senate in action during 1967–1968. He also analyzes in detail relevant documents, committee reports, and floor debates. Focused primarily on the formal decision-making structure within the Senate and on internal norms, both formal and informal, that hold that structure together, Agor’s study fruitfully compares the Chilean Senate with its peers, including the United States Senate, to which it bears surprising resemblance in form and function.

Agor examines the role of compromise and informal rules of the game in achieving a majority vote in the Senate, the power of committees and committee presidents, and political party control over Senate members. The influence of the executive, particularly in the passage of executive legislation, and its effect on the Senate’s internal system of checks and balances—both stated and understood—are examined in terms of their effect on the political strength of the Senate.

The Chilean Senate, unlike its counterparts in most other “developing countries,” has exercised genuine and effective influence in the national political system. In an epilogue to this study, Agor views events since 1968, including the election of Allende, that affected the future role of the Senate in Chilean politics.

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Political Groups in Chile
The Dialogue between Order and Change
By Ben G. Burnett
University of Texas Press, 1970

Before the Pinochet coup in 1973, Chile had a lengthy history of constitutionalism. Early in the republican era the aristocracy established order in the political system; a century later the emergent middle sectors infused politics with wider democratic practices and, relative to most of Latin America, a level of pluralism came to characterize group politics.

Despite the distinctive advantages that embellished Chile’s political system, however, certain unfulfilled promises still marred the actual picture in the early 1960s. As the lower economic strata of society were continually passed over by most of the social reforms and economic advances that bettered the general outlook of the nation, their frustrations were brought out into the open and their votes were appealed to by reformist and radical political parties anxious to break the political hegemony of moderates and conservatives.

Thus, the 1960s stood out as a high-water mark in the confrontation between, on the one side, those desirous of maintaining the status quo, or at most admitting to prescriptive change, and, on the other, progressive elements demanding deep structural alterations in the entire social fabric. This study seeks to analyze the sources of alienation, the styles and objectives of the participants in the confrontation, and the relative ability of groups to gain satisfaction of their claims upon the political system. Ben G. Burnett delineates this dialogue between order and change as it inexorably pushed toward a showdown in the presidential elections of 1964 and the congressional elections of 1965.

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Democracy After Pinochet
Politics, Parties, and Elections in Chile
Alan Angell
University of London Press, 2007

This book explores how democracy has developed in Chile since the end of the military dictatorship in 1990. It brings together an examination of international influences on the country's political development with empirically based analyses of Chilean political institutions and change. Chapters one and two examine international aspects of the 1973 coup and how these influenced the development of politics inside Chile. Chapters three, four, and five provide empirical analyses of the 1989, 1993, and 1999/2000 presidential elections, respectively. Chapter six investigates how the Pinochet factor influenced developments after 1990 and the Chilean reaction to Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998. Chapter seven assesses changes in the Chilean party system and links these to similar processes elsewhere. The final chapter examines the paradox that despite economic and social advances, opinion polls report a low level of attachment to democracy and very low levels of confidence in political institutions.

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Red Against Blue
The Liberal Party in Colombian Politics, 1863 - 1899
Helen Delpar
University of Alabama Press, 1981
“Delpar provides a history of Colombia’s liberal party covering a period in which it was first the dominant party (1863-1885) and then the party of opposition (1886-1899). Delpar’s study is well written and firmly grounded in extensive research [and] will occupy a prominent position in the sparse historiography of the late 19th century Colombia.” – Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR)
“Delpar has given us a book that is disarmingly unpretentious yet offers considerably more than the title implies. As a discussion of the Liberal Party during the latter part of the 19th century, it is more narrative and descriptive than theoretical and analytical, indeed quite free of both redundant conceptualization and overly self-conscious methodology.
“It pays due attention to historical origins, regional distribution of support the characteristics of Liberal leadership, Liberal doctrine such as it was, the rules of the political game under the constitution of 1863, and the Liberal’s adjustment to opposition status after their fall from power in the 1880s. The author’s tone is clear and she has used an impressive quantity of published sources plus the personal papers of a good number of prominent Liberals.
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The CIA in Ecuador
Marc Becker
Duke University Press, 2021
In The CIA in Ecuador Marc Becker draws on recently released US government surveillance documents on the Ecuadorian left to chart social movement organizing efforts during the 1950s. Emphasizing the competing roles of the domestic ruling class and grassroots social movements, Becker details the struggles and difficulties that activists, organizers, and political parties confronted. He shows how leftist groups, including the Communist Party of Ecuador, navigated disagreements over tactics and ideology, and how these influenced shifting strategies in support of rural Indigenous communities and urban labor movements. He outlines the CIA's failure to understand that the Ecuadorian left was rooted in local social struggles rather than bankrolled by the Soviet Union. By decentering US-Soviet power struggles, Becker shows that the local patterns and dynamics that shaped the development of the Ecuadorian left could be found throughout Latin America during the cold war.
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Populist Seduction in Latin America
The Ecuadorian Experience
Carlos De La Torre
Ohio University Press, 2000
Is Latin America experiencing a resurgence of leftwing governments, or are we seeing a rebirth of national-radical populism? Are the governments of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa becoming institutionalized as these leaders claim novel models of participatory and direct democracy? Or are they reenacting older traditions that have favored plebiscitary acclamation and clientelist distribution of resources to loyal followers? Are we seeing authentic forms of expression of the popular will by leaders  who have empowered those previously disenfranchised? Or are these governments as charismatic, authoritarian, and messianic as their populist predecessors? This new and expanded edition of Populist Seduction in Latin America explores the ambiguous relationships between democracy and populism and brings de la Torre’s
earlier work up to date, comparing classical nationalist, populist regimes of the 1940s, such as those of Juan Perón and José María Velasco Ibarra, with their contemporary neoliberal and radical successors. De la Torre explores their similarities and differences, focusing on their discourses and uses of political symbols and myths.
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Populist Seduction in Latin America
Carlos de la Torre
Ohio University Press, 2010

Is Latin America experiencing a resurgence of leftwing governments, or are we seeing a rebirth of national-radical populism? Are the governments of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa becoming institutionalized as these leaders claim novel models of participatory and direct democracy? Or are they reenacting older traditions that have favored plebiscitary acclamation and clientelist distribution of resources to loyal followers? Are we seeing authentic forms of expression of the popular will by leaders who have empowered those previously disenfranchised? Or are these governments as charismatic, authoritarian, and messianic as their populist predecessors?

This new and expanded edition of Populist Seduction in Latin America explores the ambiguous relationships between democracy and populism and brings de la Torre’s earlier work up to date, comparing classical nationalist, populist regimes of the 1940s, such as those of Juan Perón and José María Velasco Ibarra, with their contemporary neoliberal and radical successors. De la Torre explores their similarities and differences, focusing on their discourses and uses of political symbols and myths.

[more]

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State Formation in the Liberal Era
Capitalisms and Claims of Citizenship in Mexico and Peru
Edited by Ben Fallaw and David Nugent
University of Arizona Press, 2020
State Formation in the Liberal Era offers a nuanced exploration of the uneven nature of nation making and economic development in Peru and Mexico. Zeroing in on the period from 1850 to 1950, the book compares and contrasts the radically different paths of development pursued by these two countries.

Mexico and Peru are widely regarded as two great centers of Latin American civilization. In State Formation in the Liberal Era, a diverse group of historians and anthropologists from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Latin America compare how the two countries advanced claims of statehood from the dawning of the age of global liberal capitalism to the onset of the Cold War. Chapters cover themes ranging from foreign banks to road building and labor relations. The introductions serve as an original interpretation of Peru’s and Mexico’s modern histories from a comparative perspective.

Focusing on the tensions between disparate circuits of capital, claims of statehood, and the contested nature of citizenship, the volume spans disciplinary and geographic boundaries. It reveals how the presence (or absence) of U.S. influence shaped Latin American history and also challenges notions of Mexico’s revolutionary exceptionality. The book offers a new template for ethnographically informed comparative history of nation building in Latin America.
 
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Fractured Politics
Peruvian Democracy Past and Present
Edited by John Crabtree
University of London Press, 2011

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Making Institutions Work in Peru
Democracy, Development and Inequality Since 1980
Edited by John Crabtree
University of London Press, 2006

front cover of Revolutionizing Repertoires
Revolutionizing Repertoires
The Rise of Populist Mobilization in Peru
Robert S. Jansen
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Politicians and political parties are for the most part limited by habit—they recycle tried-and-true strategies, draw on models from the past, and mimic others in the present. But in rare moments politicians break with routine and try something new.

Drawing on pragmatist theories of social action, Revolutionizing Repertoires sets out to examine what happens when the repertoire of practices available to political actors is dramatically reconfigured. Taking as his case study the development of a distinctively Latin American style of populist mobilization, Robert S. Jansen analyzes the Peruvian presidential election of 1931. He finds that, ultimately, populist mobilization emerged in the country at this time because newly empowered outsiders recognized the limitations of routine political practice and understood how to modify, transpose, invent, and recombine practices in a whole new way. Suggesting striking parallels to the recent populist turn in global politics, Revolutionizing Repertoires offers new insights not only to historians of Peru but also to scholars of historical sociology and comparative politics, and to anyone interested in the social and political origins of populism.
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Modernization, Dislocation, and Aprismo
Origins of the Peruvian Aprista Party, 1870-1932
By Peter F. Klarén
University of Texas Press, 1973

Since its founding in 1930 the Peruvian Aprista party (APRA) has occupied a place of signal importance in the Peruvian political spectrum, and it is one of the most important political parties to appear in twentieth-century Latin America. Modernization, Dislocation, and Aprismo is the first major analysis of the social and political bases of the Aprista movement. Previous studies of APRA had been chiefly descriptive in nature and did not utilize modern social science approaches in analyzing the movement.

Peter F. Klarén’s major thesis is that APRA emerged in the 1930s as a direct political response to the far-reaching dislocative impact of modernization within the Peruvian sugar industry, a process that unfolded over a period of about four decades beginning in the 1890s and that substantially upset and transformed the traditional structure of society along the north coast.

Jolted by the effects of modernization, elements of the old middle and lower sectors grew increasingly hostile to the existing order. Joined by the new proletariat that was beginning to voice its collective grievances by means of the unionization process, this large, alienated segment of northern society responded overwhelmingly in 1931 to the reformist appeal of the new Aprista party. APRA, many of whose leaders were products of this environment, best expressed politically the general mood of alienation and rebellion of the area’s discontented. The eruption of the bloody and abortive Trujillo Revolution of 1932 is considered as the culmination of this process of social and economic dislocation.

In addition to presenting a major new interpretation of the origins of the Aprista movement, this study places the Aprista party in the larger Latin American context by comparing APRA with other political movements in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba that were responding to similar modernization phenomena.

This study is based not only on a large body of official party literature and local newspapers for the period, but also on the newly discovered records of the Archivo de la Cámara de Comercio, Agricultura e Industria of the Department of La Libertad for the years 1904–1932.

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Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Peru
The Rise of the Partido Civil
Ulrich Muecke
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

In the mid-nineteenth century, Peru underwent a profound transformation. As the world economy became increasingly integrated, a new trade-based ruling class emerged. Elections led to political mobilization, and those in positions of national authority found themselves forced to negotiate with regional power brokers and lower social classes.

Central to this transformation was the creation of the Partido Civil, the country’s first modern political party. Tracing its development, Ulrich Muecke revisits virtually every aspect of nineteenth-century Peruvian society.

By exploring the different forms of political action and their symbolic meanings, Muecke offers a new interpretation of the legitimization and construction of political power in Latin America of the 1800s. Using sophisticated theory and based on a wealth of primary research, the book provides insights into elections, the voting process, and power relations throughout the region.

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The Magical State
Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela
Fernando Coronil
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In 1935, after the death of dictator General Juan Vicente Gómez, Venezuela consolidated its position as the world's major oil exporter and began to establish what today is South America's longest-lasting democratic regime. Endowed with the power of state oil wealth, successive presidents appeared as transcendent figures who could magically transform Venezuela into a modern nation. During the 1974-78 oil boom, dazzling development projects promised finally to effect this transformation. Yet now the state must struggle to appease its foreign creditors, counter a declining economy, and contain a discontented citizenry. In critical dialogue with contemporary social theory, Fernando Coronil examines key transformations in Venezuela's polity, culture, and economy, recasting theories of development and highlighting the relevance of these processes for other postcolonial nations. The result is a timely and compelling historical ethnography of political power at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary reflections on modernity and the state.

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Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy
Participation, Politics, and Culture under Chávez
David Smilde and Daniel Hellinger, eds.
Duke University Press, 2011
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy brings together a variety of perspectives on participation and democracy in Venezuela. An interdisciplinary group of contributors focuses on the everyday lives of Venezuelans, examining the forms of participation that have emerged in communal councils, cultural activities, blogs, community media, and several other forums. The essays validate many of the critiques of democracy under Chávez, as well as much of the praise. They show that while government corporatism and clientelism are constant threats, the forms of political and cultural participation discussed are creating new discourses, networks, and organizational spaces—for better and for worse. With open yet critical minds, the contributors seek to analyze Venezuela’s Bolivarian democratic experience through empirical research. In doing so, they reveal a nuanced process, a richer and more complex one than is conveyed in international journalism and scholarship exclusively focused on the words and actions of Hugo Chávez.

Contributors
Carolina Acosta-Alzuru
Julia Buxton
Luis Duno Gottberg
Sujatha Fernandes
María Pilar García-Guadilla
Kirk A. Hawkins
Daniel Hellinger
Michael E. Johnson
Luis E. Lander
Margarita López-Maya
Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols
Coraly Pagan
Guillermo Rosas
Naomi Schiller
David Smilde
Alejandro Velasco

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Ambitious Rebels
Remaking Honor, Law, and Liberalism in Venezuela, 1780-1850
Reuben Zahler
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Murder, street brawls, marital squabbles, infidelity, official corruption, public insults, and rebellion are just a few of the social layers Reuben Zahler investigates as he studies the dramatic shifts in Venezuela as it transformed from a Spanish colony to a modern republic. His book Ambitious Rebels illuminates the enormous changes in honor, law, and political culture that occurred and how ordinary men and women promoted or rejected those changes.

In a highly engaging style, Zahler examines gender and class against the backdrop of Venezuelan institutions and culture during the late colonial period through post-independence (known as the “middle period”). His fine-grained analysis shows that liberal ideals permeated the elite and popular classes to a substantial degree while Venezuelan institutions enjoyed impressive levels of success. Showing remarkable ambition, Venezuela’s leaders aspired to transform a colony that adhered to the king, the church, and tradition into a liberal republic with minimal state intervention, a capitalistic economy, freedom of expression and religion, and an elected, representative government.

Subtle but surprisingly profound changes of a liberal nature occurred, as evidenced by evolving standards of honor, appropriate gender roles, class and race relations, official conduct, courtroom evidence, press coverage, economic behavior, and church-state relations. This analysis of the philosophy of the elites and the daily lives of common men and women reveals in particular the unwritten, unofficial norms that lacked legal sanction but still greatly affected political structures.

Relying on extensive archival resources, Zahler focuses on Venezuela but provides a broader perspective on Latin American history. His examination provides a comprehensive look at intellectual exchange across the Atlantic, comparative conditions throughout the Americas, and the tension between traditional norms and new liberal standards in a postcolonial society.
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Venezuela's Movimiento al Socialismo
From Guerrilla Defeat to Innovative Politics
Steve Ellner
Duke University Press, 1988
Teodoro Petkoff and the other members of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Venezuela had aroused the ire of the orthodox communist leaders by claiming to be both authentic communists and true nationalists, not bound by the dictates of either the Moscow or Maoist/Beijing wings of the party. To infuriate the traditionalists even further, Petkoff and his associates succeeded in being more than isolated critics, as MAS quickly eclipsed the traditional Venezuelan Communist Party and became that country's leading leftist group.

The author places MAS in its international national, and historical contexts in order to determine the extent to which it is a unique communist party, as it claims to be. He traces the theory of "national democratic revolution, " which MAS rejects, back to Lenin, and discusses the Latin American left's reevaluation of that thesis. Ellner examines the guerrilla movement in Venezuela, the student movement of the late 1960s, and the emergence of the "New Left" in other countries, especially noting their influence on the formation of MAS. He also discusses the group's role in Venezuelan elections and it's relations with the other parties.

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The Federal Future of Europe
From the European Community to the European Union
Dusan Sidjanski
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The European Union is building step-by-step a new federal system based on states, nations, and regions. In his authoritative and comprehensive book, Dusan Sidjanski describes the formation of the original European Community and the dynamics of the process of integration that has brought the Union to its current state. He then provides a sophisticated analytic framework for considering the future of the Union.
The author argues that federalism is the best antidote to the reemergence of nationalism in Europe. It is also the best guarantee for a peaceful community that balances the claims of national, regional, and local identity against the need for large-scale economies that springs from the forces of globalization, competition, and technical change. The Union preserves diversity within a flexible and innovating European system.
This major study of the development of the European project, informed by a thorough knowledge of the Community and Union over the years and by deep understanding of the relevant literatures in political science and political economy is important for all who study the European Union or work with it as officials and business people.
Dusan Sidjanski is founder and Professor Emeritus of the Department of Political Science, University of Geneva and Professor Emeritus, European Institute. He has authored numerous publications, most recently, The ECE in the Age of Change (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, United Nations).
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Whose Liberty is it Anyway?
Europe at the Crossroads
Stefan Auer
Seagull Books, 2012

Europe's turn of fortune is humbling, humiliating and, perhaps, irreversible. What went wrong, and when? Europe's most audacious moment occurred sometime between 1989 and 1991, a brief period that encapsulated both the demise of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the bold steps forward on the path towards an 'ever-closer union' in Western Europe. Twenty years later, the dramatic failures of economic and political integration have forced Europeans to re-consider the underpinnings of their project. The economic crisis of 2010-11 also manifested itself as a crisis of European democracy. Old questions acquired new meaning: Is it possible to maintain conditions for self-government while undermining the nation-state? What are the limits of solidarity? Can Europe be truly united through its common history, or its common currency? Is further unity in Europe even desirable?

In Whose Liberty Is It Anyway? Stefan Auer exposes the limits of the current European project by interrogating some of its many incongruities, particularly when it comes to its commitment to freedom. The author argues that the calls for more European solidarity are not convincing when Europe's poor are asked to pay for the mistakes of those who are more fortunate. Europe's unity, Auer asserts, can only be maintained by accepting its limitations and by beginning to fulfill some of its many promises.

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Brussels, the Gentle Monster
or the Disenfranchisement of Europe
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Seagull Books, 2011
The inner workings of the European Union are as much a mystery to those living within its confines as they are to those of us who reside elsewhere. The Brussels bureaucracy that sets many of the EU’s policies feels remote to its citizens, yet the influence of its decisions can extend worldwide and throughout the global marketplace.
 
In this timely and insightful essay, Hans Magnus Enzensberger blends reportage, argument, and analysis in order to make sense of the EU’s present political and economic roles and examine the EU’s origins and inherent contradictions. In Enzensberger’s view, Europe is involved in a project without precedent—the first non-violent form of post-democratic governance, which is trying to abolish the diversity of Europe and impose a regime that is not accountable to its citizens. Its often bizarre and arbitrary rules amount to a soft but relentless guardianship, dictating how half a billion people should live their lives regardless of their own political opinions and traditions. Enzensberger here offers a strategy for approaching this modern monster—at once gentle and giant, friend and foe.
 
Praise for Enzensberger
 
“How should one cope with Germany? Let’s ask Hans Magnus Enzensberger. . . . One can only marvel at his permanent alertness, his tone of cold enragement, the dimensions of his hunger for experience, most of all however, one can only marvel at his sense of important issues. For 50 years, time and again Enzensberger has posed the right questions to German society. . . . No one should ever believe Enzensberger is on his side. Whenever someone makes a clear distinction between Good and Evil, Enzensberger will jump out of his cover and shout: It’s not that simple.”—Florian Illies, Die Zeit
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The European Union
From Jean Monnet to the Euro
Dean Kotlowski
Ohio University Press, 2000
The transformation of Europe since the end of World War II has been astounding. In 1945, a battle–scarred continent lay in ruins. Today, it has achieved a level of integration, prosperity, and stability that few people could have anticipated. The life and career of the French statesman Jean Monnet and the recent adoption of the “euro” as Europe's common currency represent the bookends of this half–century–long metamorphosis.

This collection of essays, drawn from the lectures of the 1999 Baker Conference at Ohio University, explores Monnet's vision of an integrated Europe, its gradual implementation, and the social, economic, and international consequences. The scholarship focuses upon Monnet's life, personality, and legacy, the development of social policy within the European Union (EU), the economic and national security implications of the EU, and the continuation of an American presence in Europe through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

This significant collection fuses biography with comparative political economy and policy studies to help political scientists, sociologists, economists, international lawyers, and historians on both sides of the Atlantic understand important aspects of Europe's post–1945 development.
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Governing the New Europe
Jack Hayward and Edward C. Page, eds.
Duke University Press, 1995
Governing the New Europe provides a comprehensive and scholarly account of the changing political map of Europe as it emerges from the Cold War. Exploring the variations of liberal democracy and market economy among the European states, as well as current trends in these directions, the contributors to this volume, all leading authorities in European politics, consider whether a common political model has begun to emerge out of historic European diversity.
Beginning with a discussion of the political, economic, and cultural development of Europe from a historical perspective, the focus of the book shifts to an examination of the changing forms of European democracy and the move from public ownership and planning to privatization and deregulated competition. Further essays analyze the challenge to national party systems and electoral performance from emerging social movements and organized interest groups. Political and bureaucratic structures are also examined as is the new European constitutionalism reflected in the increasingly significant role of the judiciary. Lastly, attention is turned to several major themes in European politics: the changing foundations of foreign and security policy, the function of industrial champion firms, and the retreat from the welfare state. Primarily comparative in its scope, Governing the New Europe does devote particular attention to specific major states as well as to the importance of the European Union to the political life of member and non-member countries.
Neither exaggerating the common features of the patterns that have emerged in contemporary Europe nor capitulating to the complexity of enduring differences and instabilities between states, Governing the New Europe will become one of the standard texts in its field.

Contributors. Jack Hayward, Jolyon Howorth, Herbert Kitschelt, Marie Lavigne, Tom Mackie, Michael Mezey, Edward C. Page, Richard Parry, Richard Rose, Anthony Smith, Alec Stone

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The Dynamics of European Integration
Causes and Consequences of Institutional Choices
Thomas König
University of Michigan Press, 2024
In Europe’s recent history, there have been several challenges to the strength of the European Union—Brexit, COVID, financial crises, and global tensions—bringing an increased need to understand the ways that the European Union (EU) could successfully stay  together or fall apart. In examining how the European Union has changed since 1993, important puzzles have emerged, including how national government functions are transferred to the EU without reforming the EU, how increased transparency is announced while decisions are approved in informal meetings, and how the effects of the polarizing rise of Euroscepticism can be managed to still promote the formation of solidarity and trust among Europeans. To understand these puzzles, Thomas König introduces a new theory of (supra)national partyism to help explain the causes and consequences of choices made by political leaders for Europe. He uses a game-theoretical perspective to look at how conditions for leaders change through accessions of new members, shocks, and crises, and separates institutional choices into two different games played by office- and policy-seeking political leaders—the interstate summit game and the national game of party competition. The Dynamics of European Integration reveals how the reorganization of electoral systems can harness dissensus and polarization among diverse national constituencies to enable the promotion of solidarity and trust in the EU.
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Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits
Or Why the Democracy Given to Us Must Become One We Fight For
Robert Menasse
Seagull Books, 2016
In 2010, Robert Menasse journeyed to Brussels to begin work on a novel centered on the European Union. His extended stay resulted in a completely different book—Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits, a work of nonfiction examining the history of the European project and the evolving politics of nation-states.

Spanning from the beginning of the transnational idea with 1951’s Montanunion—the European Coal and Steel Community—to the current financial crisis, Menasse focuses on the institutional structures and forces both advancing and obstructing the European project. Given the internal tensions among the European Commission, Parliament, and Council, Menasse argues that current problems that are frequently misunderstood as resulting from the financial crisis are, in fact, political. Along the way, he makes the bold claim that either the Europe of nation-states will perish—or the project of transcending the nation-states will.

A provocative book, Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits deftly analyzes the financial and bureaucratic structures of the European Union and sheds much-needed light on the state of the debt crisis. Menasse brings his considerable literary expertise to the unraveling of the real state of the Union, along the way weaving an intriguing tale of one continent’s efforts to become a truly postnational democracy.
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The State of Europe
Transformation of Statehood from a European Perspective
Edited by Sonja Puntscher Riekmann, Monika Mokre, and Michael Latzer
Campus Verlag, 2004
While globalization affects the sovereignty of every nation-state, European countries face special challenges due to the emergence of the European Union. The State of Europe explores the transformation of ideas of statehood in light of the EU’s continued development, including rapidly changing notions of democracy, representation, and citizenship alongside major shifts in economic regulation. This book will be an essential guide for students and teachers of economics, political science, and international relations, as well as anyone interested in the expanding role of the EU worldwide.
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The European Union
A Critical Guide
Steven P. McGiffen
Pluto Press, 2006
The political dynamics of the European Union can often appear confusing, shrouded as they are in complex legislative processes. This book offers a clear and thorough critical introduction to the origins, development and current direction of the EU, and pinpoints the major policy debates animating decision-makers.

This revised and updated edition offers a well-illustrated analysis of each of the EU¹s major policy areas, and covers arguments both for and against the EU. McGiffen explores subjects including enlargement, internal and external security, the Euro, trade, the environment, employment, transport and regional policy. He explains how and why the debate about membership is frequently and falsely presented as if it were a conflict between 'nationalism' and Œinternationalism', and argues instead that the EU is merely one of a number of possible solutions to the the economic and political problems facing Europe.

Published in association with Spectre.

Steve McGiffen is a writer, author and consultant. Until recently he worked for the United Left Group in the European Parliament and the Socialist Party of the Netherlands. He is editor of Spectre, a radical left website which can be read at www.spectrezine.org, His previous books include Biotechnology (Pluto Press, 2005).
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Machiavelli in Brussels
The Art of Lobbying the EU
Rinus van Schendelen
Amsterdam University Press, 2002
Countless interest groups representing governments and civil societies try to lobby the European Union effectively in pursuit of the desired legislation, subsidies and more. This book describes the everyday practice of lobbying in Brussels, drawing on extensive research and the author's personal experience.

The objective of these interest groups is to influence the EU decision-making, of which they see themselves as a stakeholder. To the existing representative bodies such as the Parliament and the Council, they add their practice of lobbying for a desired outcome by making their interests present or represented at the EU level. In a roundabout way, they contribute to the EU integration and also to its democracy, so long as the following conditions are fulfilled.
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The Art of Lobbying the EU
More Machiavelli in Brussels (revised edition)
M. P. C. M. van Schendelen
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
Every day in Brussels, countless governmental and civil society interest groups seek to influence the policies of the European Union (EU). Many groups, once they have established themselves in the EU capital, apply the insights of Public Affairs (PA) management, the modern art of lobbying. Many PA practitioners in the EU as well as academics specialised in EU and PA studies developed fresh insights on ‘how to influence the EU better’. This manual brings together the most up-to-date collection of PA expertise available to anyone desiring to enhance the success of their efforts to influence the EU. This new edition of the best-selling title is filled with new details, cases, findings and practices. This fully revised and updated fourth edition of the 2002 bestseller offers compelling new insights into the most advanced practices of influencing the decision-making in the European Union’s corridors of power. The author’s uniquely privileged position as advisor to a wide range of lobby groups from several different countries throws much-needed light on best practice and success in public affairs management.
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Democracy Needs Dispute
The Debate on the European Constitution
Edited by Cornelia Brüll, Monika Mokre, and Markus Pausch
Campus Verlag, 2009

In 2005 hopes for closer European integration were dealt a potentially fatal blow when French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed new European Union constitution. Going beyond the instant analysis of journalists, which placed blame for the failed vote on the two nations’ internal politics, Democracy Needs Dispute examines a collection of media accounts of European policy debates to argue that the problem with the EU is its relative lack of vibrant political conflict. Democracy Needs Dispute offers both up-to-date analysis and a rich theoretical understanding of the problems facing further efforts at European integration.

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How to Democratize Europe
Stéphanie Hennette, Thomas Piketty, Guillaume Sacriste, and Antoine Vauchez
Harvard University Press, 2019

An all-star cast of scholars and politicians from Europe and America propose and debate the creation of a new European parliament with substantial budgetary and legislative power to solve the crisis of governance in the Eurozone and promote social and fiscal justice and public investment.

The European Union is struggling. The rise of Euroskeptic parties in member states, economic distress in the south, the migrant crisis, and Brexit top the news. But deeper structural problems may be a greater long-term peril. Not least is the economic management of the Eurozone, the nineteen countries that use the Euro. How can this be accomplished in a way generally acceptable to members, given a political system whose structures are routinely decried for a lack of democratic accountability? How can the EU promote fiscal and social justice while initiating the long-term public investments that Europe needs to overcome stagnation? These are the problems a distinguished group of European and American scholars set out to solve in this short but valuable book.

Among many longstanding grievances is the charge that Eurozone policies serve large and wealthy countries at the expense of poorer nations. It is also unclear who decides economic policy, how the interests of diverse member states are balanced, and to whom the decision-makers are accountable. The four lead authors—Stéphanie Hennette, Thomas Piketty, Guillaume Sacriste, and Antoine Vauchez—describe these and other problems, and respond with a draft treaty establishing a parliament for economic policy, its members drawn from national parliaments. We then hear from invited critics, who express support, objections, or alternative ideas.

How to Democratize Europe offers a chance to observe how major thinkers view some of the Continent’s most pressing issues and attempt to connect democratic reform with concrete changes in economic and social policies.

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Choosing Europe?
The European Electorate and National Politics in the Face of Union
Cees van der Eijk and Mark N. Franklin
University of Michigan Press, 1996


This is a book about elections to the European Parliament, their failure to legitimate and control the exercise of power in the European Union, and the consequences of this failure for domestic politics in EU member states. It also sheds new light on why voters behave the way they do. The authors examine the 1989 Europe-wide elections with the aid of large-scale surveys fielded in all twelve member countries of the (then) European Community--placing European citizens within their institutional, political, economic, and social contexts. In particular, because three countries held national elections concurrently with the 1989 European elections, the study controls for the presence or absence of a national election context--permitting the authors to investigate electoral behavior in general, not just at European elections. Looking at such behavior while taking account of the strategic contexts within which elections are held has yielded new insights about turnout and party choice, while clarifying the crisis of legitimacy that faces the European Union. The more recent Europe-wide elections of 1994 are used to validate the findings.

This book will be of interest to political scientists interested in elections, the European Union, comparative politics, and political development.

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Political Survival of Small Parties in Europe
Jae-Jae Spoon
University of Michigan Press, 2015

It is often thought that small party survival or failure is a result of institutional constraints, the behavior of large parties, and the choices of individual politicians. Jae-Jae Spoon, in contrast, argues that the decisions made by small parties themselves determine their ability to balance the dual goals of remaining true to their ideals while maximizing their vote and seat shares, thereby enabling them to survive even in adverse electoral systems.

Spoon employs a mixed-methods approach in order to explore the policy, electoral, and communication strategies of West European Green Parties from 1980 to the present. She combines cross-national data on these parties with in-depth comparative case studies of two New Politics parties, the French and British Green Parties, that have survived in similar national-level plurality electoral systems. Both of these parties have developed as organizations which run candidates in elections at the local, national, and European levels in their respective countries. The parties’ survival, Spoon asserts, results from their ability to balance their competing electoral, policy, and communication goals.

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The European Union and the Rise of Regionalist Parties
Seth K. Jolly
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Rather than weakening the forces of nationalism among member states, the expanding power of the European Union actually fosters conditions favorable to regionalist movements within traditional nation-states. Using a cross-national, quantitative study of the advent of regionalist political parties and their success in national parliamentary elections since the 1960s, along with a detailed case study of the fortunes of the pro-independence Scottish National Party, Seth K. Jolly demonstrates that supranational integration and subnational fragmentation are not merely coincidental but related in a theoretical and predictable way.

At the core of his argument, Jolly posits the Viability Theory: the theory that the EU makes smaller states more viable and more politically attractive by diminishing the relative economic and political advantages of larger-sized states. European integration allows regionalist groups to make credible claims that they do not need the state to survive because their regions are part of the EU, which provides access to markets, financial institutions, foreign policy, and other benefits. Ultimately, Jolly emphasizes, scholars and policy-makers must recognize that the benefits of European integration come with the challenge of increased regionalist mobilization that has the potential to reshape the national boundaries of Europe.

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Origins of Liberal Dominance
State, Church, and Party in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Andrew C. Gould
University of Michigan Press, 1999
How did liberal movements reshape the modern world? Origins of Liberal Dominance offers a revealing account of how states, churches, and parties joined together in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany to produce fundamentally new forms of organization that have shaped contemporary politics.
Modern political life emerged when liberal movements sought to establish elections, constitutions, free markets, and religious liberty. Yet liberalism even at its height faced strong and often successful opposition from conservatives. What explains why liberals overcame their opponents in some countries but not in others? This book compares successful and unsuccessful attempts to build liberal political parties and establish liberal regimes in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany from 1815 to World War I.
Andrew Gould argues that relations between states and churches set powerful conditions on any attempt at liberalization. Liberal movements that enhanced religious authority while reforming the state won clerical support and successfully built liberal institutions of government. Furthermore, liberal movements that organized peasant backing around religious issues founded or sustained mass movements to support liberal regimes.
Origins of Liberal Dominance offers striking new insights into the emergence of modern states and regimes. It will be of interest to political scientists, sociologists, comparative historians, and those interested in comparative politics, regime change and state-building, democratization, religion and politics, and European politics.
Andrew C. Gould is Assistant Professor of Government and Kellogg Institute Fellow, University of Notre Dame.
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Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies
Joel D. Aberbach, Robert D. Putnam, and Bert A. Rockman
Harvard University Press, 1981

In uneasy partnership at the helm of the modern state stand elected party politicians and professional bureaucrats. This book is the first comprehensive comparison of these two powerful elites. In seven countries—the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands—researchers questioned 700 bureaucrats and 6OO politicians in an effort to understand how their aims, attitudes, and ambitions differ within cultural settings.

One of the authors’ most significant findings is that the worlds of these two elites overlap much more in the United States than in Europe. But throughout the West bureaucrats and politicians each wear special blinders and each have special virtues. In a well-ordered polity, the authors conclude, politicians articulate society’s dreams and bureaucrats bring them gingerly to earth.

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Limits of Citizenship
Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe
Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal
University of Chicago Press, 1994
In many Western countries, rights that once belonged solely to citizens are being extended to immigrants, a trend that challenges the nature and basis of citizenship at a time when nation-states are fortifying their boundaries through restirictive border controls and expressions of nationalist ideologies. In this book, Yasemin Soysal compares the different ways European nations incorporate immigrants, how these policies evolved, and how they are influenced by international human rights discourse.

Soysal focuses on postwar international migration, paying particular attention to "guestworkers." Taking an in-depth look at France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, she identifies three major patterns that reflect the varying emphasis particular states place on individual versus corporate groups as the basis for incorporation. She finds that the global expansion and intensification of human rights discourse puts nation-states under increasing outside pressure to extend membership rights to aliens, resulting in an increasingly blurred line between citizen and noncitizen. Finally, she suggests a possible accommodation to these shifts: specifically, a model of post-national membership that derives its legitimacy from universal personhood, rather than national belonging.

This fresh approach to the study of citizenship, rights, and immigration will be invaluable to anyone involved in issues of human rights, international migration, and transnational cultural interactions, as well as to those who study the contemporary transformation of the nation-state, nationalism, and globalization.
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Economics and Elections
The Major Western Democracies
Michael S. Lewis-Beck
University of Michigan Press, 1990
Does a government’s fate at the ballot box hinge on the state of the economy? Is it inflation, unemployment, or income that makes the difference? What triggers economic voting for or against the incumbent – do voters look at their pocketbooks, or at the national accounts? Do economic voters “punish” rulers for bad times, but fail to “reward” them for the good times? Are voter’s judgments based on past economic performance or future policy promises? These are some of the questions considered by Michael Lewis-Beck in this major cross-national study of the effect of economic conditions on voting behavior in the Western European democracies and the United States.
 
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