Product Description: This innovative book investigates the paradoxical situation whereby organized crime groups, authoritarian in nature and anti-democratic in practice, perform at their best in democratic countries. It uses examples from the United States, Japan, Russia, South America, France, Italy and the European Union...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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This is a guide to assessing the quality of democracy and human rights in any country around the world. It introduces a universal methodology for assessing the condition of democracy in any country, or its progress in democratization. This has been developed in a three-year action programme at IDEA, the inter-governmental Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Sweden. The handbook provides a means to systematically measure the full range of values, institutions and issues relating to modern democracy that is sensitive to the underlying principles and democracy and the differences between democracies themselves. It is therefore both universal in application and capable of responding to particular aspects of any one nation's democratic arrangements. The animating principle of the handbook is that only citizens of a nation themselves are qualified to assess the quality of their own democratic arrangements. Thus, it provides a self-help guide, which gives academics, lawyers, political practitioners, journalists and interested citizens the tools to assess the state of their democracy, or any key aspects of their democracy. The handbook is a practical working document that draws on the actual experience of assessing democracy in different countries, comparative knowledge and research, and democratic principles and practice. It gives a step-by-step guide to the purposes and methods of democracy assessment; who to involve; how to use the research tools; how to validate the findings; what standards of practice to adopt; and how to present and publicise a finished assessment. It contains extracts from completed assessments, guidance on the use of qualitative and quantitative data, examples of codes of democratic practice and international and regional standards, and a vast list of accessible data sources.

Product Description: What is democracy? How do we know when we have it? Is liberal democracy merely one, or the only, version of democracy. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Comments on the first edition: "...a clear and compelling analysis of one of the most pervasive, and also poorly-understood, features of contemporary society" Teaching Philosophy "For any student the book is perfect because it both introduces the reader to the principal theories, and illustrates the impossibility of a neutral, unengaged, or purely technical understanding of the subject" The Times Higher Education Supplement "In this useful introductory book, Beetham distills important themes from the massive literatures on bureaucracy and presents them in a clear, crisp, intelligent way" Ethics * What is bureaucracy? * Are people right to see it as synonymous with red-tape, feather-bedding and inefficiency? * Can it be controlled by politicians, or made more responsive to citizens? Is it only confined to the public sector, or is it pervasive throughout all modern organizations? These are only some of the questions addressed in David Beetham's concise and wide-ranging study...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The rapid worldwide phase of democratization since the 1980s has stimulated a renewed interest in how we define and measure democracy. The contributors to this volume include leading political theorists, political scientists and experts in comparative government from across Europe...read more

Political theory has undergone a remarkable development in recent years. A systematic study of legitimacy within social science, the book starts as a critique of Weber and examines the link between a social-scientific approach and the various philosophical traditions of theorizing about legitimacy.