This book discusses the context for and arguments in favor of same-sex marriage in the United States.

"Democracy's Child places young people at the heart of pivotal conflicts, decisions and transformations in American politics. From the March for Our Lives and Black Lives Matter, to Gay Straight Alliances and the Dreamer and Sunrise movements, the prominence of young people as agents of change are unmistakable in contemporary political life. Yet as Gash and Tichenor show, these movements reflect a long history of youth political mobilization and leadership, including Progressive Era labor organizing and 1960s civil rights and anti-war activism. Children also are crucial subjects of government and adult control, inspiring contention in nearly every realm of public policy, such as education, social welfare, abortion, gun control, immigration, civil rights and liberties, and criminal justice. And young people are regularly leveraged in political life as influential symbols of innocence and deviance, or treated as political collateral (as the spectacle of "kids in cages" under the Trump administration's "family separation" policy vividly captures). In a narrative that ranges from history and law to young adult literature, Democracy's Child reveals why the control, leveraging, and agency of young people shapes and defines our political landscape. Along the way, readers learn about age or childhood as a concrete difference that combines with gender, race, class, immigration status, or sexual orientation to produce powerful systems of privilege or disadvantage"--

Democracy's Hypocrisies My gravitas to write Democracy's Hypocrisies emanated in part from President Obama's utter adversities since procurement of the office of commander in chief, but largely due to desperate attempts by a small segment of society to displace the power of the people's vote with that of their positions of enormous wealth. Numerous social issues are addressed, with the intent to uncover the hypocrisies, which have eroded traditional Democracy as we know it. Hopefully, the reader will, upon completion of this book, find the revelations both informative and enlightening. In my view, it would appear that for the entire duration of his tenure in the White House, this president has been faced with the daunting task of swimming upstream in his attempts to pass anything through congress. Additionally, he has endured more dishonor, disrespect, and caricature in his capacity as president of the United States than anyone else in the history of American presidents. No other president before Mr. Obama has sustained such ridicule while holding the most powerful and noble office in the entire universe. Nonetheless, he has demonstrated exemplary qualities in the manner in which he has maintained his dignity by remaining impervious to such acrimony clearly intended to detract him away from his agenda. There are manifestations of attempts by a small segment of society to shift the power from the people's vote to the omnipotence of their millions. Last elections saw the most money infused into campaign funds of a few candidates on both sides of the aisle--but more on the Republican end of the spectrum. More importantly, in the wake of the 2012 elections, a number of states have vamped up their efforts to disenfranchise minorities through voter suppression, allegations of voter fraud, as well as gerrymandering. This is in direct contradiction to traditional democracy, whose very fundamental principle is "government of the people, by the people and for the people." Furthermore, with the recent passage of the legislation by the Supreme Court, allowing donors to endow as much as they deem necessary to their representatives--with no obligation to divulge their sources, one can only imagine how much money will be thrown into the bag in 2016. This is total hypocrisy--given that the vote should carry more weight than the dollar in a democratic society. Clearly, there have been significant erosions to traditional democracy as we know it. It is therefore my hope that power be restored back to the people through their fundamental right to vote, thus allowing them the ability to determine who is elected to public office, rather than a handful of wealthy individuals.

This book articulates a participatory conception of deliberative democracy that takes the democratic ideal of self-government seriously. It aims to improve citizens' democratic control and vindicate the value of citizens' participation against conceptions that threaten to undermine it. The book critically analyzes deep pluralist, epistocratic, and lottocratic conceptions of democracy. Their defenders propose various institutional ''shortcuts'' to help solve problems of democratic governance such as overcoming disagreements, citizens' political ignorance, or poor-quality deliberation. However, all these shortcut proposals require citizens to blindly defer to actors over whose decisions they cannot exercise control. Implementing such proposals would therefore undermine democracy. Moreover, it seems naive to assume that a community can reach better outcomes 'faster' if it bypasses the beliefs and attitudes of its citizens. Unfortunately, there are no 'shortcuts' to make a community better than its members. The only road to better outcomes is the long, participatory road that is taken when citizens forge a collective will by changing one another's hearts and minds. However difficult the process of justifying political decisions to one another may be, skipping it cannot get us any closer to the democratic ideal. Starting from this conviction, the book defends a conception of democracy ''without shortcuts''. This conception sheds new light on long-standing debates about the proper scope of public reason, the role of religion in politics, and the democratic legitimacy of judicial review. It also proposes new ways to unleash the democratic potential of institutional innovations such as deliberative minipublics.

When, why, and how are democratic institutions reformed? This is the broad question guiding this research, rooted in a context of crises of representative democracy. Core democratic rules can be understood as the formal political rules regulating the direct relationship between elites within the political system, parties, and citizens. They are therefore the cornerstone of the functioning of any political system. This book deals with the context, the motives, and the mechanisms explaining the incidence of institutional engineering in consolidated European democracies between 1990 and 2015. It is centred on the choice of political elites to use - or not to use - institutional engineering as a response to the challenges they face. This study provides both a better empirical understanding of the world of democratic reforms in consolidated democracies, thanks to a new data-set covering six dimensions of reform in 18 European countries. Secondly, the book provides evidence about the link between the lack of political support and democratic reforms, and the role of electoral shifts in fostering reforms. Thirdly, this research shows that the final outcome of a given reform depends on the type of reform at stake and on the process used during the phase of discussion of the reform, though case studies in Ireland, France and Italy. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that contrary to what has been commonly assumed, reforms of the core democratic rules are frequent and constitute in most cases an answer of challenged political elites to the erosion of political support and electoral change. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Emilie van Haute, Professor of Political Science, Université libre de Bruxelles; Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University; and Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston.

In this volume a series of contributions look at the impact of direct democracy on those processes of representative democracy to raise – and answer – the question: Does direct democracy harm representative democracy?

If confronted with a democratic result they regard as intolerable, should citizens revolt or pursue democratic means of social change?

Revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, and reformers the world over appeal to democracy to justify their actions. But when political factions compete over the right to act in "the people's" name, who is to decide? Although the problem is as old as the great revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, events from the Arab Spring to secession referendums suggest that today it is hardly any closer to being solved. This book defends a new theory of democratic legitimacy and change that provides an answer. Christopher Meckstroth shows why familiar views that identify democracy with timeless principles or institutions fall into paradox when asked to make sense of democratic founding and change. Solving the problem, he argues, requires shifting focus to the historical conditions under which citizens work out what it will mean to govern themselves in a democratic way. The only way of sorting out disputes without faith in progress is to show, in Socratic fashion, that some parties' claims to speak for "the people" cannot hold up even on their own terms. Meckstroth builds his argument on provocative and closely-argued interpretations of Plato, Kant, and Hegel, suggesting that familiar views of them as foundationalist metaphysicians misunderstand their debt to a method of radical doubt pioneered by Socrates. Recovering this tradition of antifoundational argument requires rethinking the place of German idealism in the history of political thought and opens new directions for contemporary democratic theory. The historical and Socratic theory of democracy the book defends makes possible an entirely new way of approaching struggles over contested notions of progress, popular sovereignty, political judgment and democratic change.

The Democratic Party’s Unholy Agenda offers Christian Americans a jarring but much-needed wake-up call on what the Democratic Party and it’s anti-Biblical agenda are really about and specific reasons why true Christians should not vote for that party’s candidates. Written from the perspective of a former Democrat, this book is unique for two very important reasons. First, it details the unholy aspects of the Democratic Party’s agenda like no other book ever has. Second, it is the only book that shows how this party’s evil 21st century agenda is, in effect, an updated version of its horrific 19th century agenda. The Democratic Party’s Unholy Agenda, more than any other book, enlightens the reader on what it means to be a true Christian both outside and inside of the voting booth. Finally, this book is a warning to Christians that our votes could well determine the fate of our country and our souls.