Common ground

Sample

George C. Rable

Although much has been written about the ways in which Confederate politics affected the course of the Civil War, George Rable is the first historian to investigate Confederate political culture in its own right. Focusing on the assumptions, values, and beliefs that formed the foundation of Confederate political ideology, Rable reveals how Southerners attempted to purify the political process and avoid what they saw as the evils of parties and partisanship. According to Rable, secession marked the beginning of a revolution against politics in which the Confederacy's founding fathers saw themselves as the true heirs of the American Revolution. Nevertheless, factionalism developed as the war dragged on, with Confederate nationalists emphasizing political unity and support for President Jefferson Davis's administration and libertarian dissenters warning of the dangers of a centralized Confederate government. Both sides claimed to be the legitimate defenders of a genuine Southern republicanism and of Confederate nationalism, and the conflict between them carried over from the strictly political sphere to matters of military strategy, civil religion, and education. Consulting a wide range of sources, including newspapers, sermons, contemporary textbooks, political correspondence, and military documents, Rable constructs an analytical narrative of Confederate political culture, arguing that it did more to strengthen the Confederacy than weaken it. He concludes that despite the war's outcome, the anti-political legacy of the Confederate republic had a profound impact on the future of Southern politics.

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Edward Luce

Luce diagnoses factors behind the country's waning global leadership such as the shrinking middle class; an ineffective and flawed educational system; the stagnation of innovation in business and technology; a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy; the virulent polarization of national politics; and the damage caused by the influence of money in politics, along with endless campaigning. In the end, he assesses the prospects for change and offers a bleak outlook.

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John Blossom

Find out how social media communications is changing the content provider industry in Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Technology Changes Our Lives and Our Future. Developed through a collaborative wiki, this book is a collection of information from social media experts and serves as an example of how social media impacts the way we provide and receive content. You will learn how social media changes the way businesses market products and services, influences how people interact with the government, and dictates how we communicate with one another on a personal level.

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Michael Coppedge

This bold and comprehensive reassessment of democracy in Venezuela explains why one of the oldest and most admired democracies in Latin America has become fragile after more than three decades of apparent stability. The Venezuelan crisis is puzzling because Venezuela has held competitive elections since 1958; it has the fastest-growing economy in the region and a declining inflation rate; the military has not meddled in politics since 1962; there is no guerrilla insurgency; and drug trafficking has only begun to make an appearance. The author locates the causes of Venezuela's current problems in two political institutions. The first is partidocracia, or partyarchy. Venezuelan political parties monopolize the electoral process, dominate the legislative process, and block many of the informal channels of representation, such as interest groups, the media, the courts, and independent opinion leaders. The second cause is presidentialism, a system marked by frequent standoffs between the executive and the legislature that severely limit the president's ability to function effectively and that encourage opposition parties to frustrate the president in an effort to improve their own chances in future elections. Highlighting parallels and contrasts with other countries in Latin America and the industrialized world, the author places Venezuelan democracy in a truly comparative context for the first time, in the process revealing that Venezuela has had the most extreme partyarchy in the non-communist world. The combination of partyarchy and presidentialism has induced a cyclical pattern of factional struggles within the governing parties that has rendered them incapable of channeling popular demands between elections and has tarnished their image during campaigns. The author shows that though partyarchy initially helped democracy survive in Venezuela by giving a handful of party leaders great authority to manage crises and prevent mass disturbances, it also limited accountability and stifled meaningful popular participation, which ultimately eroded the legitimacy of the democratic regime. Partyarchy also made the executive-legislative stalemates and constitutional crises typical of presidential systems more likely and more intractable. The author supports his conclusions with evidence from his rigorous survey of 80 top leaders of the governing party, as well as from historical analysis, a multivariate model of Venezuelan elections, and more than a year of personal observation of party activities.