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Latin American women’s movements played important roles in the democratic transitions in South America during the 1980s and in Central America during the 1990s. However, very little has been written on what has become of these movements and their agendas since the return to democracy. This timely collection examines how women’s movements have responded to the dramatic political, economic, and social changes of the last twenty years. In these essays, leading scholar-activists focus on the various strategies women’s movements have adopted and assess their successes and failures.

The book is organized around three broad topics. The first, women’s access to political power at the national level, is addressed by essays on the election of Michelle Bachelet in Chile, gender quotas in Argentina and Brazil, and the responses of the women’s movement to the “Bolivarian revolution” in Venezuela. The second topic, the use of legal strategies, is taken up in essays on women’s rights across the board in Argentina, violence against women in Brazil, and gender in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru. Finally, the international impact of Latin American feminists is explored through an account of their participation in the World Social Forum, an assessment of a Chilean-led project carried out by women’s organizations in several countries to hold governments to the promises they made at international conferences in Cairo and Beijing, and an account of cross-border organizing to address femicides and domestic abuse in the Juárez-El Paso border region. Jane S. Jaquette provides the historical and political context of women’s movement activism in her introduction, and concludes the volume by engaging contemporary debates about feminism, civil society, and democracy.

Contributors. Jutta Borner, Mariana Caminotti, Alina Donoso, Gioconda Espina, Jane S. Jaquette, Beatriz Kohen, Julissa Mantilla Falcón, Jutta Marx, Gabriela L. Montoya, Flávia Piovesan, Marcela Ríos Tobar, Kathleen Staudt, Teresa Valdés, Virginia Vargas

Since its inception, the European Union has developed to become an open and transparent system which is democratically accountable to more than five hundred million European citizens. James Elles explains how the EU functions, emphasizing the emerging role of the European Parliament in the process. Elles reviews the history of Britain’s relationship with the EU and illustrates how a reluctance to consult the British people on multiple Treaty changes led to a lack of understanding about Brussels. Looking to the future, Elles assesses the global long-term trends that lie ahead to 2030 and underlines that closer European cooperation, for example on environmental and digital policies, will help them to be more easily resolved. As the next decade unfurls, the EU with President Macron at the forefront of the debate will progress and the European Parliament will continue to develop as a platform for the voice of the European people. From the disinterest of political leaders to the ambitions of emerging nations, Fiction, Fact and Future is not only a guide to why Britain failed to make the most of its EU membership, but also an optimistic message to a younger generation to help shape their future in the 21st century.
 

Challenging the posthumanist canon that celebrates the preeminence of matter, Ruth Miller, in Flourishing Thought contends that what nonhuman systems contribute to democracy is thought. Drawing on recent feminist theories of nonhuman life and politics, Miller shows that reproduction and flourishing are not antithetical to contemplation and sensitivity. After demonstrating that processes of life and processes of thought are indistinguishable, Miller finds that four menacing accumulations of matter and information—global surveillance, stored embryos, human clones, and reproductive trash—are politically productive rather than threats to democratic politics. As a consequence, she questions the usefulness of individual rights such as privacy and dignity, contests the value of the rational metaphysics underlying human-centered political participation, and reevaluates the gender relations that derive from this type of participation. Ultimately, in place of these human-centered structures, Miller posits a more meditative mode of democratic engagement.

Miller’s argument has shattering implications for the debates over the proper use and disposal of embryonic tissue, alarms about data gathering by the state and corporations, and other major ethical, social, and security issues.
 

Direct democracy is alive and well in the United States. Citizens are increasingly using initiatives and referendums to take the law into their own hands, overriding their elected officials to set tax, expenditure, and social policies. John G. Matsusaka's For the Many or the Few provides the first even-handed and historically based treatment of the subject.

Drawing upon a century of evidence, Matsusaka argues against the popular belief that initiative measures are influenced by wealthy special interest groups that neglect the majority view. Examining demographic, political, and opinion data, he demonstrates how the initiative process brings about systematic changes in tax and expenditure policies of state and local governments that are generally supported by the citizens. He concludes that, by and large, direct democracy in the form of the initiative process works for the benefit of the many rather than the few.

An unprecedented, comprehensive look at the historical, empirical, and theoretical components of how initiatives function within our representative democracy to increase political competition while avoiding the tyranny of the majority, For the Many or the Few is a most timely and definitive work.

Latin American opinion surveys consistently point to Peruvian citizens' deep distrust of their elected rulers and democratic institutions. The 2011 presidential and legislative elections in Peru, along with the regional and municipal polls of the previous year,showed once again the degree of political fragmentation in contemporary Peru andthe weakness of its party system. Fractured Politics examines the history of political exclusion in Peru, the weaknessof representative institutions, and the persistence of localized violent protest. It also evaluates the contribution of institutional reforms in bridging the gap between state and society, including Peru's Law on Political Parties, administrative decentralization, and the experience of the Defensor, or ombudsman's office. The chapters, by leading scholars of Peruvian politics, emerge from a conference, held in 2009 in Saint Antony's College Oxford. Julio Cotler, from the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP), was the keynote speaker.

Framing the Audience explores the cultural politics of the Great Depression and World War II through the prism of art appreciation. Isadora Helfgott interrogates the ideological and political motivations for breaking down barriers between fine art and popular culture. She charts the impact that changes in art appreciation had on the broader political, social, cultural, and artistic landscape.

Framing the Audience argues that efforts to expand the social basis of art became intertwined with—and helped shape—broader debates about national identity and the future of American political economy. Helfgott chronicles artists’ efforts toinfluence the conditions of artistic production and display. She highlights the influence of the Federal Art Project, the impact of the Museum of Modern Art as an institutional home for modernism in America and as an organizer of traveling exhibitions, and the efforts by LIFE and Fortune magazines to integrate art education into their visual record of modern life. In doing so, Helfgott makes critical observations about the changing relationship between art and the American public.

What are the environments, the public spaces, in which ordinary people become participants in the complex, ambiguous, engaging conversation about democracy: participators in governance rather than spectators or complainers, victims or accomplices? What are the roots, not simply of movements against oppression, but also of those democratic social movements which both enlarge the opportunities for participation and enhance people's ability to participate in the public world?

In Free Spaces, Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte argue for a new understanding of the foundations for democratic politics by analyzing the settings in which people learn to participate in democracy. In their new Introduction, the authors link the concept of free spaces to recent theoretical discussions about community, public life, civil society, and social movements.

Freedom Is an Endless Meeting offers vivid portraits of American experiments in participatory democracy throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on meticulous research and more than one hundred interviews with activists, Francesca Polletta challenges the conventional wisdom that participatory democracy is worthy in purpose but unworkable in practice. Instead, she shows that social movements have often used bottom-up decision making as a powerful tool for political change.

Polletta traces the history of democracy in early labor struggles and pre-World War II pacifism, in the civil rights, new left, and women's liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, and in today's faith-based organizing and anti-corporate globalization campaigns. In the process, she uncovers neglected sources of democratic inspiration—Depression-era labor educators and Mississippi voting registration workers, among them—as well as practical strategies of social protest. But Freedom Is an Endless Meeting also highlights the obstacles that arise when activists model their democracies after familiar nonpolitical relationships such as friendship, tutelage, and religious fellowship. Doing so has brought into their deliberations the trust, respect, and caring typical of those relationships. But it has also fostered values that run counter to democracy, such as exclusivity and an aversion to rules, and these have been the fault lines around which participatory democracies have often splintered. Indeed, Polletta attributes the fragility of the form less to its basic inefficiency or inequity than to the gaps between activists' democratic commitments and the cultural models on which they have depended to enact those commitments. The challenge, she concludes, is to forge new kinds of democratic relationships, ones that balance trust with accountability, respect with openness to disagreement, and caring with inclusiveness.

For anyone concerned about the prospects for democracy in America, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting will offer abundant historical, theoretical, and practical insights.

"This is an excellent study of activist politics in the United States over the past century. . . . Assiduously researched, impressively informed by a great number of thoughtful interviews with key members of American social movements, and deeply engaged with its subject matter, the book is likely to become a key text in the study of grass-roots democracy in America."—Kate Fullbrook, Times Literary Supplement

"Polletta's portrayal challenges the common assumption that morality and strategy are incompatible, that those who aim at winning must compromise principle while those who insist on morality are destined to be ineffective. . . . Rather than dwell on trying to explain the decline of 60s movements, Polletta shows how participatory democracy has become the guiding framework for many of today's activists."—Richard Flacks, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"In Freedom Is an Endless Meeting, Francesca Polletta has produced a remarkable work of historical sociology. . . . She provides the fullest theoretical work of historical sociology. . . . She provides the fullest theoretical picture of participatory democracy, rich with nuance, ambiguity, and irony, that this reviewer has yet seen. . . . This wise book should be studied closely by both academics and by social change activists."—Stewart Burns, Journal of American History

A reprint of Abernethy's excellent historical study of the state of Tennesse from its founding through the antebellum years. In documenting the development of an agrarian society on the frontier, Abernethy develops important and controversial theses on the relation between frontier life and the development of American democracy, calling into question the mythology and motives previously associated with leaders such as William Blount, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson.

While English-language studies of Japanese law have enjoyed remarkable growth in the past half-century, scholars have given only scant attention to the broad sweep of Japan's constitutional history. Deftly combining legal and historical analysis, Lawrence W. Beer and John M. Maki contrast Japan's two modern-era constitutions - the Meiji Constitution of 1889 and the Showa Constitution of 1947. Moving beyond a narrowly focused study of the documents themselves, Beer and Maki present these constitutions as key to understanding differences in Japanese society and politics before and after World War II. Their clear and fluid presentation makes this an engaging and approachable study of not only constitutional law but also this remarkable period in Japanese history.

At the nation's founding, the fundamental principle underlying American government was liberty, and the nation's new government was designed to protect the rights of individuals. The American founders intended to design a government that would protect the rights of its citizens, and at that time the most serious threat to people's rights was government. Thus, the United States government was designed with a constitutionally limited scope to preserve the rights of individuals and limit the powers of government.
The government's activities during two world wars and the Great Depression greatly increased its involvement in people's economic affairs, and by the time of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the transformation was complete. By the end of the twentieth century, the fundamental principle underlying American government had been transformed to democracy, and public policy was designed to further the will of the majority. The result has been a government that is larger and broader in scope.
From Liberty to Democracy examines American political history using the framework of public choice theory to show how American government grew more democratic, and how this resulted in an increase in the size and scope of government. It should appeal to historians, political scientists, and economists who are interested in the evolution of American government but does not assume any specialized training and can be read by anyone interested in American political history.
Randall G. Holcombe is DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics, Florida State University