Bøger i Political Sociology serien

In this groundbreaking book, sociologist Andrew Perrin shows that rules and institutions, while important, are not the core of democracy. Instead, as Alexis de Tocqueville showed in the early years of the American republic, democracy is first and foremost a matter of culture: the shared ideas, practices, and technologies that help individuals combine into publics and achieve representation. Reinterpreting democracy as culture reveals the ways the media, public opinion polling, and changing technologies shape democracy and citizenship. As Perrin shows, the founders of the United States produced a social, cultural, and legal environment fertile for democratic development and in the two centuries since, citizens and publics use that environment and shared culture to re-imagine and extend that democracy.American Democracy provides a fresh, innovative approach to democracy that will change the way readers understand their roles as citizens and participants. Never will you enter a voting booth or answer a poll again without realizing what a truly social act it is. This will be necessary reading for scholars, students, and the public seeking to understand the challenges and opportunities for democratic citizenship from Toqueville to town halls to Twitter.

"Lobbying and political interest groups occupy an ambivalent place in advanced democracies. This insightful book injects a new sociological understanding of politics and policy. As the book convincingly reveals, a sociological understanding of lobbying and interest groups illustrates the edges and boundaries of representative democracy itself"--

War is a paradox. On the one hand, it destroys bodies and destroys communities. On the other hand, it is responsible for some of the strongest human bonds and has been the genesis of many of our most fundamental institutions.

Why do powerful states like the U.S. , U.K.

Despite global shifts in world power, racial conflict remains one of the major problems of contemporary social life. This concise and engaging book demonstrates the interplay between identity, power and conflict in the creation, persistence and transformation of patterns of race and ethnic relations across the globe.

Many of us may have participated in grassroots groups, changing the world in small and big ways, from building playgrounds and feeding the homeless, to protesting wars and ending legal segregation.

Despite many predictions made over the last two hundred years that nation-states and nationalism are transient phenomena that will eventually fade away, the historical record and contemporary events show otherwise.

Since the late eighteenth century, politics, protest, and the state have evolved together, each shaping the other in significant ways. This title shows how the modern national state developed in tandem with social movement mobilization, arguing that to understand the state fully, you cannot ignore the role of political protest.

In this timely book, Cedric de Leon examines the ways in which social scientists and other observers have imagined the relationship between parties and society. He introduces and critiques the full range of approaches, using enlivening comparative examples from across the globe.

States over the past 500 years have become the dominant institutions on Earth, exercising vast and varied authority over the economic well-being, health, welfare, and very lives of their citizens.

* Provides a concise political and sociological introduction to social policy. * Helps readers to grasp the nature of social programs and the political struggles surrounding them. * Takes a broad comparative and historical viewpoint of social policy in the developed world.