Rescuing Democracy /

This book proposes a new institution -- the 'People's Forum' -- to enable democratic governments to effectively address long-running issues like global warming and inequality. It would help citizens decide what strategic problems their government must fix, especially where this requir...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Smith, Paul E. (Paul Edmund) (Author)
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: Baltimore, Maryland : Project Muse, 2020
Series:Book collections on Project MUSE.
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Online Access:Full text available:
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020 |a 9780998237503 
035 |a (OCoLC)1183978484 
040 |a MdBmJHUP  |c MdBmJHUP 
050 4 |a JC423  |b .S557 2016 
100 1 |a Smith, Paul E.  |q (Paul Edmund),  |e author. 
245 1 0 |a Rescuing Democracy /   |c Paul E. Smith. 
264 1 |a Baltimore, Maryland :  |b Project Muse,  |c 2020 
264 3 |a Baltimore, Md. :  |b Project MUSE,   |c 2020 
264 4 |c ©2020 
300 |a 1 online resource (518 pages):   |b illustrations 
336 |a text  |b txt  |2 rdacontent 
337 |a computer  |b c  |2 rdamedia 
338 |a online resource  |b cr  |2 rdacarrier 
500 |a Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE. 
504 |a Includes bibliographical references (pages 469-499) and index. 
505 0 |a Signs of failure -- Diagnosing dysfunction. Democratic dysfunction from fundamental structure -- Susceptibility to dysfunction : types of democracy -- A pervasive symptom of dysfunction : escalating the scarcity of natural capital -- Prescribing a remedy. The people's forum : a deliberative aid for liberal democracies -- Design details of the people's forum -- Likely reactions to the forum -- Supporting devices, performance indicators and trialing the people's forum. 
506 0 |a Open Access  |f Unrestricted online access  |2 star 
520 |a This book proposes a new institution -- the 'People's Forum' -- to enable democratic governments to effectively address long-running issues like global warming and inequality. It would help citizens decide what strategic problems their government must fix, especially where this requires them to suffer some inconvenience or cost.The People's Forum is first based on a new diagnosis of government failure in democracies. The book tests its own analyses of government failure by seeing whether these might help us to explain the failures of particular democracies to address (and in some cases, to even recognize) several crucial environmental problems. The essential features of a new design for democracy are described and then compared with those of previous institutional designs that were also intended to improve the quality of democratic government. In that comparison, the People's Forum turns out to be not only the most effective design for developing and implementing competent policy, but also the easiest to establish and run. The latter advantage is crucial as there has been no success in getting previous designs into actual trial practice. It is hoped that this book may inspire a small group to raise the money to set up and run the People's Forum. Then, as citizens see it operating and engage with it, they may come to regard the new Forum as essential in helping them to deliberate long-running issues and to get their resulting initiatives implemented by government. Smith also discusses how the People's Forum must be managed and how groups with different political ideologies may react to it.An Afterword sets out the method by which this design was produced, to help those who might want to devise an institution themselves. The new concepts in environmental science that the book develops to test its diagnosis are applied in an Appendix to outline crucial options for the future of Tasmania. Similar options apply to many countries, states and provinces. As indicated above, those choices are currently beyond the capacity of democratic governments to address and in some cases, even to recognize. But the People's Forum may lift them out of that morass. 
588 |a Description based on print version record. 
650 0 |a Democracy. 
650 0 |a Deliberative democracy. 
655 7 |a Electronic books.   |2 local 
710 2 |a Project Muse,  |e distributor. 
776 1 8 |i Print version:  |z 9780998237503 
710 2 |a Project Muse.  |e distributor 
830 0 |a Book collections on Project MUSE. 
856 4 0 |z Full text available:   |u https://muse.jhu.edu/book/76515/ 
999 |c 234337  |d 234336