Continuities In Political Action

This open access book explores the role of continuity in political processes and practices during the Age of Revolutions. It argues that the changes that took place in the years around 1800 were enabled by different types of continuities across Europe and in the Americas. With historians of modernity tending to emphasise the rise of the new, scholarship has leaned towards an assumption that existing modes of action, thought and practice simply became extinct, irrelevant or at least subordinate to new modes. In contrast, this collection examines continuities between early modern and modern political cultures and organization in Europe and the Americas. Shifting the focus from political modernization, the authors examine the continued relevance of older, often local, practices in (post)revolutionary politics. By doing so, they aim to highlight the role of local political traditions and practices in forging and enabling political change. The book argues that while political change was in fact at the centre of both the old and new polities that emerged in the Age of Revolutions, it coexisted with, and was indeed enabled by, continuities at other levels.

Change and Continuity in Canadian Politics gets to the heart of key issues and provides important insights into contemporary Canadian government and politics.

The establishment of electoral systems in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan presents both a complex set of empirical puzzles and a theoretical challenge. Why did three states with similar cultural, historical, and structural legacies establish such different electoral systems? How did these distinct outcomes result from strikingly similar institutional design processes? Explaining these puzzles requires understanding not only the outcome of institutional design but also the intricacies of the process that led to this outcome. Moreover, the transitional context in which these three states designed new electoral rules necessitates an approach that explicitly links process and outcome in a dynamic setting. This book provides such an approach. Finally, it both builds on the key insights of the dominant approaches to explaining institutional origin and change and transcends these approaches by moving beyond the structure versus agency debate.

This book deals with the theme of political participation in France, focusing on conventional and unconventional forms of political activism over the last three decades. Measures of social integration and political involvement are used to question the validity of social capital theory.

The transformation of east Germany since unification has wrought vast changes in the economy and in society and left deep scars as the types of social protection offered by the centralised socialism of the previous regime gave way to uncertainties and individualised life chances. Social Transformation in Eastern Germany investigates the deep economic and social processes which east Germany has undergone, highlighting the restructuring, the social impacts and the stresses of adjustment experienced by key social groups whose workplace and social context has been recast almost out of recognition since 1990.