As the party that has held power more times than any other, the Conservatives have played a crucial role in the shaping of British society. And yet the leaders who have stood at its helm – from Sir Robert Peel to Rishi Sunak, via Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher – have steered the party vessel with enormously varying degrees of success, particularly latterly, when the short but destructive tenures of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss did much to damage the party's reputation for competenc...

As the party that championed trade union rights, the creation of the NHS and the establishment of a national minimum wage, Labour has played a crucial role in the shaping of British society. And yet the leaders who have stood at its helm – from Keir Hardie to Sir Keir Starmer, via Clement Attlee, Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn – have steered the party vessel with enormously varying degrees of success.The requirements, techniques and goals of the Labour leadership since the party's in...

There are worldwide concerns about the quality of elections and democracy, but also an ambiguity in academia, the international community and popular discourse about how to define and measure good elections. This Element develops an original concept of electoral integrity based around human empowerment. Elections serve a purpose: they should give citizens voice, empower the everyday citizen against the powerful and act as mechanisms for political equality. Secondly, it argues that there ha...

War has been an ever-present feature of human existence. The analysis of wars has tended to focus on either their causes or the military and strategic consequences of a conflict. This book argues that war can have a much wider impact across layers of society that go beyond international boundaries. It presents a heuristic multi-disciplinary framework for analysing the ripple and backwash effects across five connected analytical layers around the world: material; human capabilities; economi...

China has traditionally been held up around the world as the archetype of centralised governance and a top-down system of public administration. But to what extent does this remain true of modern China? This book provides an updated perspective on modern China through a series of cutting edge, original studies focusing on public administration in China.The book opens with an overview of the key political institutions and the evolution of public administration research in China, fol...

The Trump presidency has been one of the most eventful and controversial in American history, with consequences for the governance and policy of the US and beyond. While Trump left office claiming a long list of ‘Trump Administration Accomplishments’, his time in office was also marked by a hailstorm of criticism. But beyond the sensationalist tweets and news stories, what policy effects did he bring?This volume provides an extensive and authoritative set of studies evaluating Dona...

Elections around the world are plagued with the problem of unequal levels of participation. This can have profound consequences for election results, representation and policies. This book focuses on the interventions that can be used to redress the turnout gap and other inequalities within the electoral process.The book defines the concept of inclusive voting practices to refer to policy instruments which can reduce turnout inequality between groups and mitigate other ine...

This book offers the first comparative monograph on the management of elections.The book defines electoral management as a new, inter-disciplinary area and advances a realist sociological approach to study it. A series of new, original frameworks are introduced, including the PROSeS framework, which can be used by academics and practitioners around the world to evaluate electoral management quality. A networked governance approach is also introduced to understand the full range of ...

"A masterful depiction of the party today. . . . McGregor illuminates the most important of the contradictions and paradoxes. . . . An entertaining and insightful portrait of China's secretive rulers." —The Economist"Few outsiders have any realistic sense of the innards, motives, rivalries, and fears of the Chinese Communist leadership. But we all know much more than before, thanks to Richard McGregor's illuminating and richly-textured look at the ...

A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his worldIt has the quality of myth: a poor cobbler’s son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a top leader in a band of revolutionary zealots. When the band seizes control of the country in the aftermath of total world war, the former seminarian ruthlessly dominates the new regime until he stands as absolute ruler of a vast and terr...

Commonly known in the West as the "Little Red Book," Quotations from Mao Zedong contains a selection from Mao Zedong's political statements and speeches. From 1964 to 1976, Quotations was published in nearly 50 editions, in Chinese and in 37 other languages, becoming one of the most printed books in history. While most editions of Quotations from Mao Zedong were printed with a red vinyl cover, the CN Times edition is available in both standard trade paperback and standard ebook formats.

**“Monumental.” —The New York Times Book ReviewPulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history**In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world’s largest peasant economy into “socialist mode...