From agriculture to security, the policies of the European Union have wide-reaching consequences for the EU's member states and citizens, and for the wider world. Policy-Making in the European Union begins with an overview of EU policy-making as a whole, defining the processes and institutions involved, and introducing the analytical approaches that are necessary for understanding them. A wide range of policy areas are then explored in detail, including thesingle market, environmental policy,...

Comparative European Politics: Distinct Democracies, Common Challenges provides a complete guide to European politics through a comparative lens. The authors explore not only the 27 European Union member states, but also other European systems such as the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, to help readers understand the patterns that have shaped modern Europe. Organised thematically, the book is structured in three parts, beginning with elections and representati...

As international organizations become ever more prominent in global politics it is increasingly urgent to understand their power, their limits, and their effects. Now in its fourth edition, this leading textbook provides the definitive introduction to modern international organizations, from the legal charters of their beginnings, to the issues they engage with in the contemporary world. In his analysis of the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court and ...

Karl Marx called religion "the opium of the masses" because of the illusory relief it offered from the cold realities of capitalism. Today, the hard reality that we must face is that we have fundamentally and irrevocably damaged life on Earth, and while distracting opiates are everywhere, it is clear that the root cause is none other than capitalism itself.

Building upon a completely unexplored facet of Marx's thought that has been lying dormant for more than a century, Japanese sta...

Public administration and policy analysis education have long emphasized tidiness, stages, and rationality, but practitioners frequently must deal with a world where objectivity is buffeted by, repressed by, and sometimes defeated by value conflict. Politics and policy are "messy" and power explains much more about the policy process than does rationality. Public Policy Praxis, now in a thoroughly revised fourth edition, uniquely equips students to better grapple with ambiguity and complexity.

By emphasizing mixed methodologies, the reader is encouraged, through the use of a wide variety of policy cases, to develop a workable and practical model of applied policy analysis. Students are given the opportunity to try out these globally applicable analytical models and tools in varied case settings (e.g., county, city, federal, international, plus urban and rural) while facing wide-ranging topics (starving farmers and the red panda in Nepal, e-cigarettes, GMOs, the gig economy, and opioid abuse) that capture the diversity and reality of public policy analysis and the intergovernmental and complex nature of politics. The fourth edition expands upon its thorough exploration of specific tools of policy analysis, such as stakeholder mapping, content analysis, group facilitation, narrative analysis, cost-benefit analysis, futuring, and survey analysis...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A former Wall Street quant sounds the alarm on Big Data and the mathematical models that threaten to rip apart our social fabric with a new afterword

A manual for the twenty-first-century citizen . . . relevant and urgent. Financial Times

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review The Boston Globe Wired Fortune Kirkus Reviews The Guardian Nature On Point

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasing...

This revised and updated second edition introduces students of violent conflict to a variety of prominent theoretical approaches, and examines the ontological stances and epistemological traditions underlying these approaches. Theories of Violent Conflict takes the centrality of the group as an actor in contemporary conflict as a point of departure, leaving us with three main questions. What makes a group? Why and how does a group resort to violence? Why and how do or dont they stop? The book...

This new Routledge Handbook offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the meanings and uses of the term peacebuilding, and presents cutting-edge debates on the practices conducted in the name of peacebuilding. The term peacebuilding has had remarkable staying power. Other terms, such as conflict resolution have waned in popularity, while the acceptance and use of the term peacebuilding has grown to the extent that it is the hegemonic and over-arching term for many forms of mediatio...

Since their classic volume The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes was published in 1978, Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan have increasingly focused on the questions of how, in the modern world, nondemocratic regimes can be eroded and democratic regimes crafted. In Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, they break new ground in numerous areas.

They reconceptualize the major types of modern nondemocratic regimes and point out for each type the available paths to democratic transition a...

This accessible introduction to the system of public administration uses a clear, country by country analysis to the contemporary system of public administration and management in a number of significant countries. This text examines the extent to which new public management, politicians and public opinion can influence bureaucracies in various countries; in addition, it explores the role of public administration systems within the wider political systems and democratic frameworks of their st...