La creación de ciencia nueva en materia de ciencias sociales en especial en torno a gobernabilidad, ciudadanía y democracia participativa es aún muy incipiente. Su difícil tratamiento metodológico, ya sea cualitativo y/o cuantitativo de los temas, es multifactorial e interdisciplinar, requiriendo para su concreción la incidencia de elementos humanos, institucionales, económicos y políticos, difíciles de reunir. Esta obra pretende acercarnos a los asuntos que desde un análisis comparativo han generado una alianza estratégica entre la Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León y la Universidad de Murcia. Este libro se caracteriza por mostrar una nueva dimensión de la investigación temática transitando de la metodología tradicional a la metodología mixta, partiendo de una exegesis que ha permitido a los coordinadores delimitar los temas de mayor impacto actual en México y España e identificar a los expertos ad hoc a estos temas. Otra de sus características es que se sustentan en programas doctorales, lo que ha permitido poder acceder a los apoyos institucionales necesarios para lograr su publicación, pero principalmente a la concreción de las investigaciones ya que algunas de ellas forman parte de tesis doctorales en proceso, identificando un problema real no argumentativo, respaldadas en una hipótesis, por lo que su comprobación se sustenta en metodología mixta, de ahí que los temas elegidos sean aún más relevantes. El texto se articula en torno a once capítulos, de los que seis proceden de México y cinco de España. En su presentación se funden y mezclan con el fin de dotar al texto de mayor riqueza y dinamismo.

This volume considers corruption as a multidimensional, complex phenomenon in which various forms of corruption may overlap at any given time. Extending the seemingly paradoxical notion of “legal corruption” to such settings as the USA, Spain, and the Czech Republic, the book seeks to augment our understanding of corruption in democracies by focusing on conduct that is considered by large segments of the population to be corrupt even though they are not explicitly defined as such by the law or the governing elites. Such behaviors are not often captured by corruption perception indexes or identified by scholars who regard corruption as a single category—usually restricted to bribery. However, they are liable to incur a heavy price both in terms of trust in specific governments and of general system support. As illustrated by developments in Spain, the Czech Republic, and the corrosive presidential campaign of 2016 in the USA, these actions are liable to endanger both the quality and actual viability of democratic orders. This volume looks into the possibilities of legal reforms and anticorruption campaigns aiming to correct the consequences of such corruption on government legitimacy. A comparison between the anticorruption campaigns in the competitive authoritarian context of Russia and the fully authoritarian setting of China helps to identify both the difficulties and the possibilities of such efforts in democratic regimes.

This book, in bringing together some of the leading international scholars on electoral behaviour and communication studies, provides the first ever stock-take of the state of this sub-discipline. The individual chapters present the most recent studies on campaign effects in North America, Europe and Australasia. As a whole, the book provides a cross-national assessment of the theme of political campaigns and their consequences.

Using a comparative approach, this book examines how political communication and the mass media have played an important role in the consolidation of democratic institutions.

Public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens' Assemblies, Juries, Panels and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems ranging from climate change to infrastructure investment decisions. They convene groups of people representing a wide cross-section of society for at least one full day – and often much longer – to learn, deliberate, and develop collective recommendations that consider the complexities and compromises required for solving multifaceted public issues.

This book presents the results of systematic comparative analyses of electoral behavior and support for democracy in 13 countries on four continents. It is based on national election surveys held in "old" and "new" democracies in Europe (Germany, Britain, Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Bulgaria), North and South America (the United States, Chile and Uruguay), and Asia (Hong Kong) between 1990 and 2004. It is methodologically innovative, notwithstanding the fact that its core concern with "political intermediation" (i.e., the flow of political information from parties and candidates to voters through the mass-communications media, membership in secondary associations, and direct, face-to-face contacts within interpersonal networks) was first introduced to the study of electoral behavior by Paul Lazarsfeld and his collaborators in the 1940s. In addition to reviving that long-neglected analytical framework, this book breaks new ground by systematically exploring the impact of socio-political values on electoral behavior. It also analyzes the role of political intermediation in forming basic attitudes towards democracy (which are crucial for the consolidation of new democracies), and, in turn, channeling those orientations into various forms of political behavior. Some of the findings presented in this volume are dramatic, and clearly reveal that these channels of information are among the most powerful factors influencing the development of political attitudes and partisan electoral behavior. So, too, are socio-political values in some countries (particularly the United States). This volume is the first book-length product of the now 18-country Comparative National Elections Project.