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This chapter provides an analytical framework aimed at measuring citizen participation in public accountability processes beyond the fundamental mechanism of parliamentary elections. The framework juxtaposes and adapts ideas from Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation and Bovens’s notion of public accountability as containing important elements of learning. The resulting five levels of citizen participation in public accountability are based on increasing degrees of citizen participation, from non-participatory “education” (the lowest level) through involvement, advice, collaboration, and joint ownership (the highest level). As the levels are ascended, accountability-elements evolve from citizens’ passive reception of information to enabling citizens to pose questions, pass judgments, define and apply consequences and, finally, to engage in agenda- setting to ensure effectiveness and responsiveness. Some dilemmas and tensions arising from incorporating citizens into accountability measures at different levels are discussed.

Liberal societies have long been concerned about the effective control of the powerful governmental institutions that arise within them. Over the past decade and a half, governments have been reluctant to curb the power of private corporations, but the public has sought and found ways to call corporations to account without the mediation of government. In the “court of public opinion,” private “accountability agents” press their demands for accountability without legal backing. These accountability agents constitute the external accountability structure that all social organizations and enterprises face. The evolving processes are predicated on various legal structures and behavioral processes that help to endue organizations with social legitimacy by connecting external demands for accountability to the internal goals of the enterprise and its leadership.

Crises—be they natural disasters, industrial accidents or system collapses—are no longer seen as “acts of God”; they immediately invoke intense debates on culpability and consequences. Crisis management is scrutinized in and by different forums such as mass media, judicial authorities, independent investigators, and political inquiries. Strategies by accountees vary between blame re-allocation and exhibition of empathy (such as public apologies) and responsiveness. These strategies and the outcome of the accountability process affect private and organizational reputations, professional positions, public policies and, ultimately, such crisis-induced accountability processes produce societal re-equilibration.

Historical institutionalism (HI) has traditionally focused on formal institutions designed and enforced by official entities in advanced industrial democracies. Yet the modalities of endogenous institutional change delineated by HI reveal that the causal mechanisms of institutional transformation are typically informal. This chapter proposes a more inclusive ontology of institutions that views institutions as a single two-dimensional Möbius strip with both formal and informal components—regardless of regime type or level of economic development. Focusing on “adaptive informal institutions” that arise in a multi-tiered institutional context can show how informal institutions compromise, subvert, and even facilitate reforms of formal institutions.

During the last few decades, feminist affect studies have enunciated challenging epistemological and ontological questions based on numerous discussions and readings of affect as emotive intensities, intuitive reactions, and life forces. Affect has created a space for rethinking theoretical issues that range from the dualisms between body and mind to the critique of identity politics and critical reading. This theorizing has underlined the sensual qualities of being and the capacity to experience and understand the world in profoundly relational and productive ways. This chapter presents examples of the wide spectrum of contemporary feminist affect studies. It discusses the notion of “affective turn,” concentrating on the way it has been seen as a reaction and a challenge to alleged limitations of poststructuralism and deconstruction; describes definitions of affect; explores understandings of the linkages between epistemology and ontology, and offers some reflections on the feminist politics of affects.

This chapter probes the past, present, and emerging scholarship in the study of African political leadership. Key questions the chapter will seek to address include: what is the state of the study of African political leadership? It provides a primer on some of the salient and distinctive scholarship and studies already produced in various realms of African political leadership. It concludes with a brief reflection on the challenges with which Africa’s political leaders are likely to be confronted with as well as the commensurate challenges, issue areas, and research that scholars of African political leadership should be expending greater focus, time, and energy on in order to energize and expand the field of African political leadership studies even further.

This chapter traces key developments in feminist thought on agency through an underlying tension between the descriptive and normative senses of the term. Feminist theories of agency as relational autonomy displace problematic ideas of sovereignty yet remain entangled in a problematic prescriptivism about the different ways women choose to lead their lives. This adjudicative agenda is overcome in feminist theories of agency as resistance that are grounded in less prescriptive ideas of emancipatory action as subversion from within. These, in turn, are subject to the criticism that resistance is a peculiarly Western preoccupation that leads to the ethnocentric discounting of other types of active agency where women in nonsecular societies create meaningful identities for themselves within, not against, the dominant cultural norms. The chapter goes on to consider how some theorists have sought to bypass the normative dilemmas that accompany the cross-cultural analysis of agency.

This article talks about aggregating and representing political preferences. It presents the challenge of social choice analysis and identifies the conditions for representative democracy and preference aggregation. Multiple issue congruence, vote correspondence, and single dimensional issue congruence, which are the three major approaches to the comparative study of preference aggregation, are discussed as well.

The arts are an established part of social movement repertoire. Artistic representations are important to internal movement dynamics and in communicating movement ideas to the wider world. Art practices form the core of the symbolic and expressive aspects of social movements. When created within movement contexts, art reveals truth as the movement sees it. At the same time and through the same process, artistic representations and expressions make the movement visible to itself. Movement art is thus part of the coming-to-be of a social movement. The art created within a social movement objectifies the ideas and emotions which motivate and guide that movement, providing a mirror for the movement to know itself. The same processes of objectification and representation make it possible to transmit protest traditions over time and space. Objectified and materialized, the art of social movements re-create protest traditions and become which become ready-made resources for other movements.

This article studies the belief systems and political decision making and examines the observation that political scientists have the ability to tell a coherent story about citizens and public opinion. It reviews and summarizes the original story about citizens and politics, which can be found in Converse's ‘The Nature of Mass Belief Systems’. The next section discusses three revisions of the story and the studies that gird them. The article ends with an examination of the validity of these three revisions.

The study of ministerial leadership suffers from lack of access and cross-country variation. The available literature shows that the leadership of cabinet ministers, although real, is constrained. In homogeneous single-party governments, the prime minister, as the party leader, is in a strong position, but collective cabinet meetings are less decisive. In coalition governments it is the other way around: the prime minister is in a weaker position, at least with respect to ministers from other parties, but collective decision-making is more important. The literature provides no evidence that ministers who are specialized technocrats face fewer constraints than ministers who are generalist politicians: in ministerial recruitment the distinction is not very stark and seems to be fading. What is particularly lacking is research into the psychological factors affecting ministerial leadership.

This chapter examines whether, how, and why training and development can help political leaders to become more effective in leadership. The chapter deploys theory and concepts from organizational psychology, generic leadership theory, and political science to address these questions. It establishes key concepts with which to analyse these questions: whether leadership is nature or nurture; developmental trajectories; leadership challenges; capabilities and forms of knowledge; training or development; leader or leadership development before considering the role of development interventions. Four frameworks are applied to considering training and development for politicians, showing the need to consider not just the individual but also the leadership group, and to take account of the type of challenges being addressed and the type of interventions that may assist the acquisition or enhancement of leadership skills and judgement. While the academic and practice field remains small in the early twenty-first century, it is growing and there is at least some limited evidence that training and development is feasible and can achieve positive outcomes for leadership behaviours. Further research is needed to amplify and theorize what works, for whom, in what roles, and with what leadership challenges, and why.

The Catholic right was made up of groups within the DC and in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. During the early years of the Republic it was highly critical of De Gasperi as too soft on Communism and not responsive to the Vatican’s wishes. Moreover, some sections of the Right did not easily accept democratic government, and rejected the social and institutional progressivism embodied by De Gasperi. Rightists sought to push the Christian Democracy (DC) toward alliance with the monarchists and neo-fascist in order to oppose the Communists, and attempted to present an ultraconservative list to contest the 1952 municipal elections in Rome. Pressure to push the DC right continued well after De Gasperi’s death. The fear of secession and the formation of a new party on the right were engrained in the DC’s leadership, and did not disappear until the party’s “opening to the left” under Moro’s leadership.

A vast territory, deep regional and linguistic differences, and a diverse population pose a challenge to the administration of elections and the determination of voting behavior. Election management in Canada has changed in recent years. Campaign financing is more strictly controlled that ever, advance voting and same-day registration have been introduced to facilitate easier voting, and fixed-term elections have been introduced. This article discusses the changes and challenges faced by the Canadian elections and voting system. Among the challenges faced are the efforts to enhance the equity and fairness of the electoral process. These efforts are seen as conflicting with the right of freedom of expression guaranteed by the Canadian Charter. Among the changes Canadian electoral processes have undergone are the emergence of campaigns, the pervasiveness of media coverage, decentralized federalism, and the introduction of a single-member plurality electoral system. Some of the topics discussed in this article include: managing elections, voter registration, distribution of seats, and anomalies in the Canadian electoral system.

Three waves of social science thinking have marked the debate about the state and its transformations since World War II. During the first wave, the dominant intellectual perspectives of the postwar boom period—pluralism, Marxism, modernization theory, and behavioralism—largely neglected the state analytically. In the second wave, an emerging historical-institutionalist camp portrayed the state as central to the differential responses of countries to common challenges, such as slow growth and democratic crisis,. The historical-institutionalist perspective was countered, particularly among Anglo-American scholars, by a more critical neoliberal view of the state. In the most recent third wave, globalization and other international developments have fueled the sense that states are becoming less relevant, a perspective championed by neoliberals. Historical-institutionalists have responded in two ways, with some scholars pointing to the persistence of established state policies and institutions, while others have emphasized state transformations, identifying new roles and missions for states.

This chapter distinguishes between government, economy, and the third sector to locate the space for a civic leadership that can promote social change. The chapter separates leadership from formal positions of authority. This simple decoupling has profound implications. It extends politics beyond the realm of government, and challenges fundamental assumptions about leadership, including intentions, the nature of power and authority, and followership. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future directions for the study of civic leadership.

Civil resistance is a form of contentious politics that eschews violent tactics and strategies in favor of nonviolent ones. Employing methods likes strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations, nonviolent activists have often defeated their adversaries, including highly repressive states. This chapter aims to introduce the reader to civil resistance as a social phenomenon and a scholarly field of study. In order to do so, the chapter commences with a discussion of what civil resistance is and what it is not. Next, I briefly survey the scholarly literature on civil resistance. Third, the chapter explores the outcomes of civil resistance campaigns. Finally I suggest a few ways in which social movements scholars can benefit from the insights generated by students of civil resistance. I conclude that social movement and revolution theorists can benefit greatly from the civil resistance literature’s heavy focus on collective actors’ strategies and tactical choices.

This article discusses democratization and civil society. An explanation of the concept of civil society is provided, followed by the various functions of civil society. It reveals that the concept of civil society was largely ignored by researchers for most of the twentieth century. Democratization and the transition to democracy and emergence of a civil society are discussed. The latter portion of the article is mostly concerned with political culture and the quality of civil society.

This article discusses the clash of values across civilizations and presents some illustrative examples of how key value dimensions compare across global regions. Seven substantive topics are discussed in this article, namely: happiness, the basic value configuration of the world, the role of government, globalization and confidence in democratic institutions, social capital, regional identity, and religiosity.