This book explores why, how, and under what conditions a single-party regime uses formal democratic institutions to strengthen its rule. Zhongyuan Wang challenges the traditional perceptions that the Chinese congress acts either as mere window dressing or as an immediate catalyst for democratization. He argues that managed elections and mobilized representation are two strategic cards of China’s one-party regime. By downplaying input electoral competition but promoting output congressional representation, the Chinese Communist Party has been committed to remodeling its unique brand of “socialist democracy” as an alternative to liberal democracy. Such a model of democracy with Chinese characteristics features the “Leninist trinity” of the Party’s leadership, the rule of law, and people’s sovereignty, as well as a new form of mobilized representation that relies heavily on non-electoral accountability from the top down. Remodeling democracy enables China’s one-party regime to enhance its resilience and consolidate and sustain its rule.

The recent revival of democracy across much of the globe, and the fragility of many of the new regimes, have inspired renewed interest in the origins of dictatorship and democracy in modern times. This book assembles renowned specialists on Eastern and Western Europe, the U.S., Latin America, and Japan to explore why democracies have succeeded and why they have failed over the past 100 years.

Since the nation’s founding, the strategic manipulation of congressional districts has influenced American politics and public policy

This book examines how modern Nigerian political institutions have grappled with the resurgence of traditional institutions of political leadership in the post-colonial era. The contributors examine the role and nature of traditional governance institutions in West Africa from pre-colonial times to the post-colonial era. Part I considers a range of traditional institutions including monarchies, Islamic institutions and the role of culture and arts such as masking and music in traditional leadership. Part II focuses on modern governance institutions, elites, political action, arts, and democracy in post-colonial Nigeria. Part III examines democratic institutions and processes in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, covering issues such as electoral reforms, women’s political participation, and democratic citizenship. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African politics, governance, and democratization.

Citizens, political leaders, and scholars invoke the term 'democracy' to describe present-day states without grasping its roots or prospects in theory or practice. This book clarifies the political discourse about democracy by identifying that its primary focus is human activity, not consent. It points out how democracy is neither self-legitimating nor self-justifying and so requires critical, ethical discourse to address its ongoing problems, such as inequality and exclusion. Wallach pinpoints how democracy has historically depended on notions of goodness to ratify its power. The book analyses pivotal concepts of democratic ethics such as 'virtue', 'representation', 'civil rightness', 'legitimacy', and 'human rights' and looks at them as practical versions of goodness that have adapted democracy to new constellations of power in history. Wallach notes how democratic ethics should never be reduced to power or moral ideals. Historical understanding needs to come first to highlight the potentials and prospects of democratic citizenship.

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.

In this interdisciplinary study, Faherty argues that throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Americans conceptualized their still unsettled political and social states through metaphors of home building. During this period, a pervasive concern with the design and furnishing of houses helped writers to manage previous encounters with settlements, both native and European, and to imagine and remodel a new national ideal. By aligning the period’s architectural concerns (registered in both the interior and exterior of houses) with concurrent debates about the need to create a national identity in the wake of the American Revolution, Faherty registers how representations of the house were a crucial locus for debating broadly shared concerns about the anxieties of nation building. Topics include Abraham Lincoln’s use of architectural motifs in his 1858 senatorial campaign (the “house divided against itself ” speech); the arguments about domestic identity embodied in the designs of Mount Vernon and Monticello; the lingering import of colonial and indigenous settlements on post-revolutionary culture as registered in the work of William Bartram and Lewis and Clark; Charles Brockden Brown’s representations of the multivalent legacies of Pennsylvania’s architectural landscapes; Washington Irving’s attempts to preserve and remodel national architectural and literary practices by underscoring the manufactured nature of European cultural production; the shifting importance of the house and American attitudes toward nature in the work of three generations of the Cooper family; and the gendering of domestic space in the work of Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Richly informed by contemporary work in literary studies, history, art history, and cultural criticism, Remodeling the Nation ranges incisively across the work of political theorists, social critics, novelists, poets, natural historians, landscape artists, travel writers, and authors of architectural and domestic treatises.