DEMOCRACY UNDER STRESS focuses on the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and its implications for democracy. Why and how did the crisis come about? Are there any instructive lessons to be drawn from comparisons with the Great Depression of the 1930s? What are the democratic response mechanisms to cope with serious crises? Do they work? Is China a new trend setter? Do values matter? Are global democratic rules a possibility? These are some of the key questions addressed in the volume.

The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America. In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. The last time American public life had been so thoroughly altered was in the late eighteenth century, at the founding and in the years immediately following. William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated peopleÕs rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power. Arguing against the myth that America was a weak state until the New Deal, New Democracy traces a steadily aggrandizing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was flexing power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognized, putting the lie to libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.

The book expounds on the role played by democracy in China's revolution and modernization led by the Communist Party of China (CPC), and how the CPC, in both its party building and state building, has constantly sought to leverage democracy's positive functions while avoiding its shortcomings.Special attention is paid to reconstructing and explaining the historical contexts from which the Party's theoretical innovations have emerged, thus offering readers insights into the inner political logic that has shaped China's development.The author, a member of the Party's senior policy panel, offers a perceptive analysis of the modernization of the country and its governing capacity, and provides a clear assessment of how democracy in China has developed with the times.Always bearing the big picture in mind, the author has not shied away from some of the more controversial parts of China's recent history, and his deep understanding of relevant Party documents and historical facts give strong support to his analyses. He concludes that that the Party is central to leading the nation to explore its path of socialism with Chinese characteristics and that the country has always emerged stronger after setbacks.

Essays on the promise and dangers of the Internet for democracy.

Mobilizing for Democracy is an in-depth study into how ordinary citizens and their organizations mobilize to deepen democracy. Featuring a collection of new empirical case studies from Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this important new book illustrates how forms of political mobilization, such as protests, social participation, activism, litigation and lobbying, engage with the formal institutions of representative democracy in ways that are core to the development of democratic politics. No other volume has brought together examples from such a broad Southern spectrum and covering such a diversity of actors: rural and urban dwellers, transnational activists, religious groups, politicians and social leaders. The cases illuminate the crucial contribution that citizen mobilization makes to democratization and the building of state institutions, and reflect the uneasy relationship between citizens and the institutions that are designed to foster their political participation.

The book compares five newly emerged democracies in Europe, South East Asia, Latin America and Africa. Cutting across vastly dif¬fer¬ent historical and cultural backgrounds it tells the story of how societies come to terms with a painful past and how politics, culture and the economy intertwine in the process of creating new democratic nations.

Relying on an astounding collection of more than three decades of firsthand research, Frank M. Bryan examines one of the purest forms of American democracy, the New England town meeting. At these meetings, usually held once a year, all eligible citizens of the town may become legislators; they meet in face-to-face assemblies, debate the issues on the agenda, and vote on them. And although these meetings are natural laboratories for democracy, very few scholars have systematically investigated them. A nationally recognized expert on this topic, Bryan has now done just that. Studying 1,500 town meetings in his home state of Vermont, he and his students recorded a staggering amount of data about them—238,603 acts of participation by 63,140 citizens in 210 different towns. Drawing on this evidence as well as on evocative "witness" accounts—from casual observers to no lesser a light than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Bryan paints a vivid picture of how real democracy works. Among the many fascinating questions he explores: why attendance varies sharply with town size, how citizens resolve conflicts in open forums, and how men and women behave differently in town meetings. In the end, Bryan interprets this brand of local government to find evidence for its considerable staying power as the most authentic and meaningful form of direct democracy. Giving us a rare glimpse into how democracy works in the real world, Bryan presents here an unorthodox and definitive book on this most cherished of American institutions.