The Ashgate Research Companion to the Politics of Democratization in Europe: Concepts and Histories

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Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2008 - 436 Seiten
Democratization' is a concept often used in academic book titles. Yet not many of them deal with the initial breakthrough of democratization. This research companion presents an alternative view to the widespread assumption that Western democracies should be the normative reference for the study of democratization elsewhere. Rather, it questions the universal validity of such an assumption by searching the history of European politics and by paying specific attention to the struggles of democratization accomplished outside Western Europe. This way of reading history highlights neglected dimensions of democratization such as rhetoric, conceptual change, gender and time, all of which serve as new dimensions of a topic that is seemingly well known.The authors apply a comparative approach to analysing debates in the primary sources in a number of countries and languages, with the aim of situating the results into a broader European context. The volume consists of 25 chapters distributed among four main sections that focus on European democratization from different historical and analytical perspectives. Its objective is to discuss the politics, concepts and histories involved in democratization as a complex of changes that has altered the conditions of political action and debate in the continent for the past two centuries.The sections of this title are structured as follows. The seven chapters of the first section, Concepts of Democratization, focus on the historical and typological aspects of the conceptual controversies around democratization. The six chapters of the second section, Democratization Practices, refer to the operative practices in the politics of democratization. The six chapters in the third section, Democratizing Changes, connect democratization with more longterm historical and political changes. The five chapters of the fourth section, Contexts of Democratization, take a definite thematic or national context as their point of departure. There exists no comprehensive volume on the democratization in Europe from the eighteenth century to the present. This volume offers scholars, students, politicians, journalists and other interested readers a picture that avoids anachronisms by reminding of the topics and problems that political agents have faced before the quasiuniversal acceptance of democracy.

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Inhalt

On the Politics Concepts and Histories of European Democratization
1
PARTI CONCEPTS
17
Direct Democracy Ancient and Modern
37
Rousseaus Theory of Democracy
55
Representative Government or Republic? Sieyès
75
Democratic Politics and the Dynamics of Passions
89
Disobedient State and Faithful Citizen? Relocating Politics
101
The Gendered Subjects of Political Representation
119
Spectres of Totality
219
CHANGES
233
Gendering Political Representation? The Debate on Gender
251
Common
267
The Disappearance
285
The History of Parliamentary Democracy in Denmark
301
CONTEXTS
315
Do Political Parties Matter? Direct Democracy and Electoral
337

PRACTICES
135
Political Times and the Rhetoric of Democratization
151
Democratization and the Instrumentalization of the Past
167
The Rhetoric of Intellectual Manifestos from the First World
185
Feminist Political Action
199
The Breakthrough of Universal Suffrage in Finland 19051906
355
The DisAppearance of the Demos
389
The Past Present and Future of Democratization
405
Index
413
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