Politics A Unified Introduction to How Democracy Works

This comprehensive introduction to politics provides an essential template for assessing the health and workings of present day democracy by exploring how democratic processes bring public policy into line with popular preferences. Incorporating the latest findings from Big Data across the world, it provides a crucial framework showing students how to deploy these for themselves, providing straightforward, practical orientation to the scope and methods of modern political science. Key features: Everyday politics is explained through concrete applications to democracies across the world; Predictive theories illuminate what goes on at various levels of democracy; Outlines - in easy to understand terms - the basic statistical approaches that enable empirically-informed analysis; Rich textual features include chapter summaries, reviews, key points, illustrative briefings, key concepts, project and essay suggestions, relevant reading all clearly explained in ‘How to Use This Book’; Provides a firm basis for institutional and normative approaches to democratic politics; Concluding section reviews other approaches to explaining politics, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Politics is an essential resource for students of political science and of key interest to economics, public policy analysis and more broadly the social sciences.

Preface: Explaining Politics Systematically Introduction: Politics and Policy What Do We Want to Explain and How? Part I:Processes Elections alternate party-based governments with different preferences and priorities thus bringing public policy into line with centrist popular preferences in the long run: Overview 1. Why Politics? Making Policies to Provide Public Goods 2. How Popular Preferences Develop 3. Measuring Electoral Preferences 4. Electors’ Policy Thinking: From a Joined Up Left-Right Perspective to Issue-by-Issue Reactions 5. Party Policy Thinking: Framing Policy Targets and Election-Based Estimates of Majority Preferences 6. Matching Public Policy to Popular Preferences 7. The ‘Web of Explanation’: Relating Process Theories to each other Within a General Political Science Context Part II: Rules Rules designate – but may misrepresent – majority preferences, thus biasing policy outcomes: Overview 8. Majority Choice of Policies: Voting Paradoxes and Attempted Solutions 9. General Elections and Election Systems: Finalizing Collective Choice of Policies Part III:Protagonists Parties and governments shape popular preferences and reflect them in public policies: Overview 10. Citizens, Parties and Governments: Interactive Preference Formation 11. Parties: Ideological Policy-Carriers 12. Governments: Prime Participants in Policy Making 13. Ministries: Separating out Policy Areas Part IV: States Collective action without binding rules: Overview 14. Globalization and World Democracy Part V: Explanation Explaining politics by specifying its processes so as to predict outcomes Overview: Theory-Driven Data-Analysis 15. Generating ‘Big Data’: Sources, Procedures, Error Checks 16. Simplifying ‘Big Data’: Dimensions, Majorities and the (Missing?) Middle 17. Managing ‘Big Data’: Theoretical Explanation and Statistical Analysis 18. Developing Political Science by Explaining Democracy

Ian Budge is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Government, University of Essex UK, and well known internationally as author of numerous research articles and textbooks on democratic politics.