The Nasserist revolution of 1952 had a massive impact on the Egyptian educational system. For the first time, the doors of university education were opened to masses of people in a Third World country, and hundreds of thousands of the sons and daughters of peasants, workers, and lower-middle-class employees seized the opportunity. But quantitative growth was not matched by qualitative advance, and the gap between expectations and reality has rarely been so wide. The result was one of the world's most turbulent student movements. This history of that movement's most critical years, first published in 1985, was written by a young Egyptian who was a participant in many of the events and was intimately acquainted with them. Ahmed Abdalla describes the sociological composition of the student body, the physical and social conditions in the universities, the shifts in government education policy, and the attempts of the students to influence the direction of national development in both domestic and foreign policy. The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt is an important contribution to our understanding of Egypt's modern history, and will also be of interest to anyone concerned with the more universal issues of higher education, social change, and state politics in the Third World.
Education policymaking is traditionally seen as a domestic political process. The job of deciding where students will be educated, what they will be taught, who will teach them, and how it will be paid for clearly rests with some mix of district, state, and national policymakers. This book seeks to show how global trends have produced similar changes to very different educational systems in the United States and Japan. Despite different historical development, social norms, and institutional structures, the U.S. and Japanese education systems have been restructured over the past dozen years, not just incrementally but in ways that have transformed traditional power arrangements. Based on 124 interviews, this book examines two restructuring episodes in U.S. education and two restructuring episodes in Japanese education. The four episodes reveal a similar politics of structural education reform that is driven by symbolic action and bureaucratic turf wars, which has ultimately hindered educational improvement in both countries.
This book engagingly presents an intriguing account of many of the principles of UK government politics and how these have an important bearing on everyday office life as experienced by the working population. Here is a fascinating account of the findings of two former Cabinet ministers Lords Blunkett and Baker who were interviewed by the author. Oral testimony allows the reader to learn about the perspectives of political power brokers and provides data and insight not always apparent or revealed from historical records and archive material. The overriding aim is to analyse the nature of politicking in central government and to apply the techniques and lessons of national politics to everyday office life. The book offers a political framework, giving behavioural pointers to assist those who face challenging circumstances that could impinge on their well-being and business efficiency in the workplace. A back to basics methodology is advised, touching on a range of techniques, including, for example, that gossip is an effective way of getting back at someone. This touches upon Blunketts assertion that Michael Gove MP is a zealot and a politician having an ideological obsession. Applying the Lessons refers moreover to cases calling for bargaining and negotiation, also a part of the life of the whips in Parliament, and an essential tool for office business. As a seasoned historian and political analyst, Richard Willis revealingly unravels the nature of political power and control, and shows how Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair initially supposedly gave Baker and Blunkett considerable scope in introducing reform. He goes on to explain how the two peers give their critique on policy-making against a background which is of definite benefit to office managers and supervisors, executive assistants, PAs, administrators, and administrative/administration assistants.
Social science research has frequently found conflict between Latinos and African Americans in urban politics and governance, as well as in the groups' attitudes toward one another. Rodney E. Hero and Robert R. Preuhs analyze whether conflict between these two groups is also found in national politics. Based on extensive evidence on the activities of minority advocacy groups in national politics and the behavior of minority members of Congress, the authors find the relationship between the groups is characterized mainly by non-conflict and a considerable degree of independence. The question of why there appears to be little minority intergroup conflict at the national level of government is also addressed. This is the first systematic study of Black–Latino intergroup relations at the national level of United States politics.
Fills a gap in scholarship on an increasingly important field within Political Science. Comparative Politics, the discipline devoted to the politics of other countries or peoples, has been steadily gaining prominence as a field of study, allowing politics to be viewed from a wider foundation than a concentration on domestic affairs would permit.
Michael Apple offers a powerful analysis of current debates and a compelling indictment of rightist proposals for change. Apple presents the causes and effects of further integrating schools into the corporate agenda, as well as current calls for a national curriculum and national testing, privatization and voucher plans, and fundamentalist religious pressures to censor textbooks. He demonstrates who will be the winners and losers culturally and economically as the conservative restoration gains in strength, bringing with it an even greater restratification of knowledge and students in terms of race, class, and gender.
Chronicles the conflict between religious and secular forces in Israel. In Judicial Power and National Politics, Second Edition, Patricia J. Woods returns to an issue that has only grown in relevance since the first edition’s publication in 2008: the religious-secular conflict in Israel. The first edition focused on the role that courts and justices play in deeply charged political battles. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, social groups turned to the judicial arm of the state in an effort to force the state to change its laws and policies on religious personal status law, or family law. Through an extensive case study of the interactions of the women’s movement with the High Court of Justice, Woods argues that the most important determining factor explaining when, why, and how national courts enter into the world of divisive politics is found in the intellectual or judicial communities with whom justices live, work, and think about the law. The interaction among members of this community over time culminates in new legal norms. This second edition takes into account what has happened in the past decade, with public debate over religion and the state moving away from the court and into the realm of popular politics—on the Knesset floor, in the media, in shopping malls, and on the streets. Included for the first time is the dataset for the author’s national survey of women’s movement volunteers. Patricia J. Woods is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida.
In twelve essays, influential scholars in political science explore the meaning of political leadership from the kaleidoscopic perspectives of the leaders, institutions, goals, procedures, problems, and traditions involved. The approaches, as varied as the subject itself, coalesce around the central question of how leaders interact with, transform, or are controlled by the organizations they lead.
The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics is a comprehensive collection that considers Australia's distinctive politics— both ancient and modern— at all levels and across many themes. It examines the factors that make Australian politics unique and interesting, while firmly placing these in the context of the nation's Indigenous and imported heritage and global engagement. The book presents an account of Australian politics that recognizes and celebrates its inherent diversity by taking a thematic approach in six parts. The first theme addresses Australia's unique inheritances, examining the development of its political culture in relation to the arrival of British colonists and their conflicts with First Nations peoples, as well as the resulting geopolitics. The second theme, improvization, focuses on Australia's political institutions and how they have evolved. Place-making is then considered to assess how geography, distance, Indigenous presence, and migration shape Australian politics. Recurrent dilemmas centres on a range of complex, political problems and their influence on contemporary political practice. Politics, policy, and public administration covers how Australia has been a world leader in some respects, and a laggard in others, when dealing with important policy challenges. The final theme, studying Australian politics, introduces some key areas in the study of Australian politics and identifies the strengths and shortcomings of the discipline. The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics is an opportunity for others to consider the nation's unique politics from the perspective of leading and emerging scholars, and to gain a strong sense of its imperfections, its enduring challenges, and its strengths.
In this study of political party development in North Carolina during the antebellum period, Thomas E. Jeffrey accounts for the persistence of the second-party system in that state, emphasizing the sectional conflict that divided eastern plantation and western small farming counties. Although members of the Whig and Democratic parties disagreed strongly over national issues, the state issues—public school funding, internal improvements, the creation of new counties—divided citizens along sectional rather than party lines. Party leaders attempted to reconcile progressive western interests and conservative eastern interests by accentuating cohesive national issues. Jeffrey reveals factors that preserved the vitality of the secondparty system in North Carolina even as other states became politically stagnant. This vitality would shape politics of the Old North State during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The upheaval of the Civil War vindicated the policies of the Whigs, and although extinct outside of the state, this party would lead North Carolina into the age of the New South.
The authors in this collection challenge traditional notions of the 'minority' and explore Canada's national political system and institutions as a unit.
