Introduction to Political Theory

Crick complains that the term has become a bland synonym for ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, a hurrah word without any specif ...

Tocqueville’s portrait of America is that of a society of radical liberalism, not of democracy: he himself notes the enslavement ...

The argument between the liberals and the liberals-turned-democrats was over whether the male poor would use their rights to str ...

communists is that they do not merely pretend to be democratic: they ‘are democratic’ (1982: 60–1, 56). This leads most commenta ...

Solutions to the problem of low participation It could be argued, however, that low participation undermines democracy. How demo ...

Even if voting is not the only form of democratic participation, it is important and there is, we think, a strong argument for c ...

Representational and direct democracy Do we need to make a choice between representational democracy and direct democracy: betwe ...

The ‘mirror’ theory of representation It is sometimes argued that representation can only be fair if exact percentages of groups ...

Democracy and the state The problem with much of the analysis of democracy is that it assumes that democracy is a form of the st ...

The post-war period has seen the development of what Held calls the UN Charter model (1995: 86). However, although this has made ...

Held argues that the nation-state would ‘wither away’ but by this he does not mean that the nation-state would disappear. What h ...

since he asked: when the people govern, over whom do they rule? Many conservatives overlooked the statist character of classical ...

Let me illustrate this logical point with an empirical example. Take the idea that was noted of Ian Paisley’s ‘Protestant state ...

manner of exclusion clauses in practice. Liberals only reluctantly converted to democracy in the nineteenth century when they fe ...

If democracy is to involve self-government, there is a conflict between democracy, on the one hand, and the state, on the other. ...

‘models’. Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics(1989) is clear and comprehensive, and particularly memorable for its critique of majo ...

Chapter 6 Citizenship Introduction Is the term ‘citizenship’ legal, philosophical, political, social or economic? Or is it a com ...

‘Being British’: pride, passports and princes I n February 2004, 19 immigrants received British passports in a ceremony in which ...

Citizenship and liberalism The notion of citizenship arises with ancient Greek thinkers (much of the argument here follows Hoffm ...

other hand, appears to be bleakly negative towards the concept of citizenship, arguing that it seems to ignore the realities of ...