Product Description: Citizen participation is a central component of democratic governance. As participatory schemes have grown in number and gained in social legitimacy over recent years, the research community has analyzed the virtues of participatory policies from several points of view, but usually giving focus to the most successful and well-known grass-roots cases...read more

Product Description: A fascinating study of the contribution of ordinary men and women to Spain’s democratic transition of the 1970s. Radcliff argues that participants in neighbourhood and other associations experimented with new practices of civic participation that put pressure on the authoritarian state and made the building blocks of a future democratic citizenship...read more

Product Description: Building on one of sociology's core ideas—that social ties can shape collective outcomes—Democracy's Voices shows that connections across class boundaries can remake public rhetoric and thus the quality of democratic life. Robert M...read more

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Product Description: Focusing on coalitional decision-making, this book explains the political effects of the transformation of the Spanish regime to a constitutional monarchy following General Franco's death in 1975. Some of the questions which this volume raises are: What happened to the old coalition members? What is their role in the new regime? Do they influence the direction of Spanish democracy? If not, why not? What have been the consequences of any coalitional realignment? Which new coalition members are facilitating change and which are preventing change...read more