Critical elections

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Matt Beech and Simon Lee

Drawing upon the expertise of a team of established researchers, Ten Years of New Labour provides a detailed and comprehensive evaluation of the ideas, institutions and policies that shaped the Blair Governments' decade in office. The reader is provided with a critical analysis of the key domestic policy choices, including New Labour's agenda and legacy for economic and social policy, constitutional reform, including the impact upon Westminster and the Office of the Prime Minister, and the Labour Party's relationship with the trades union. The impact of the Blair Governments' policy choices overseas are explored through evaluations of defence policy, Tony Blair's 'liberal interventionism' in international politics, and New Labour's relationship with the European Union.

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Andrew Marr

"Andrew Marr analyses the real sources of power in Britain and the threats to our democracy. He argues that the political traditions of which we are rightly so proud need to be restored, and that our institutions are in urgent need of repair." "Looking beyond the traditional centres of influence - the Monarchy, the Lords, the St. James's Street clubs, the judiciary - Andrew Marr focuses on the less established but in his view more potent sources of power, such as the market, the organized lobbies, the media and the quangos. Beginning in the domain of the ordinary voter, he tramps through the ever-widening realms of the local parties, councils and quangos; to the Commons, the State, the lobbyists and pressure groupies; and to the wider world of European and global power beyond. In each case he asks: who really has power, and should a democrat be worried?"--BOOK JACKET.

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Richard R. Beeman

"In The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America, Richard R. Beeman offers an overview of political life in pre-Revolutionary America. Ranging from Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania to the backcountry regions of the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and northern New England, Beeman reveals an extraordinary diversity of political belief and practice. In doing so, he closes the gap between eighteenth-century political rhetoric and reality." "Political life in eighteenth-century America, Beeman demonstrates, was diffuse and fragmented, with America's British subjects and their leaders often speaking different political dialects altogether. Although the majority of people living in America before the Revolution would not have used the term "democracy," important changes were under way that were making it increasingly difficult for political leaders to ignore "popular pressures." As the author shows in a final chapter on the Revolution, those popular pressures, once unleashed, were difficult to contain and drove the colonies slowly and unevenly toward a democratic form of government. Synthesizing a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Beeman offers an account of the way politics actually worked in this formative time for American political culture."--BOOK JACKET.

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Giovanni Sartori

The second edition of this pathbreaking, highly innovative comparative study in state-building by a major political scientist is a fully updated examination of the problems of making democratic government work. He concludes with a detailed proposal for a new type of government: alternating presidentialism. This meets the need for strong parliamentary control and efficient government, with safeguards against both parliamentary obstructionism and government by decree, and so could help to avoid political paralysis in Latin America, in the post-communist countries of Europe and in countries with dysfunctional parliamentary systems such as Italy and Israel.