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Creating a Transparent Democracy

Author : Shamar Rinpoché

Publisher : New Age Books

Page : 82 pages

File Size : 50,12 MB

Release : 2007-10

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 9788178223100

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Book Description

This book is an attempt to point out and remove the defects of democracy. Political power and authority to be effective, must be decentralized.It is generally believed that democracy, though not perfect, is yet the best form of government created by man. However, with all its merits, democracy leaves scope for betterment. The present book is an attempt to point out and remove the defects of democracy. Political power and authority, to be effective, must be decentralised. Decentralisation is necessary for social justice and people's participation in decision making. People must be provided political literacy. It is unrealistic to expect illiterate and ill-informed people to understand political literacy. It is unrealistic to expect illiterate and ill-informed people to understand political and economic issues rationally and comprehensively. Further, democracy without accountability means little. As such all those who exercise political power, must be accountable for their decisions. Among freedoms, the freedom of expression is of fundamental importance.



Social Media and Democracy

Author : Nathaniel Persily

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 365 pages

File Size : 25,83 MB

Release : 2020-09-03

Category : Business & Economics

ISBN : 1108835554

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Book Description

A state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the effects of digital technology on democracy.



Making Politics Work for Development

Author : World Bank

Publisher : World Bank Publications

Page : 350 pages

File Size : 14,81 MB

Release : 2016-07-14

Category : Business & Economics

ISBN : 1464807744

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Book Description

Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.



Information, Democracy, and Autocracy

Author : James R. Hollyer

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 401 pages

File Size : 23,49 MB

Release : 2018-09-27

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1108356338

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Book Description

Advocates for economic development often call for greater transparency. But what does transparency really mean? What are its consequences? This breakthrough book demonstrates how information impacts major political phenomena, including mass protest, the survival of dictatorships, democratic stability, as well as economic performance. The book introduces a new measure of a specific facet of transparency: the dissemination of economic data. Analysis shows that democracies make economic data more available than do similarly developed autocracies. Transparency attracts investment and makes democracies more resilient to breakdown. But transparency has a dubious consequence under autocracy: political instability. Mass-unrest becomes more likely, and transparency can facilitate democratic transition - but most often a new despotic regime displaces the old. Autocratic leaders may also turn these threats to their advantage, using the risk of mass-unrest that transparency portends to unify the ruling elite. Policy-makers must recognize the trade-offs transparency entails.



The Right to Know

Author : Ann Florini

Publisher : Columbia University Press

Page : 378 pages

File Size : 27,40 MB

Release : 2007

Category : Business & Economics

ISBN : 0231141580

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Book Description

The Right to Know is a timely and compelling consideration of a vital question: What information should governments and other powerful organizations disclose? Excessive secrecy corrodes democracy, facilitates corruption, and undermines good public policymaking, but keeping a lid on military strategies, personal data, and trade secrets is crucial to the protection of the public interest. Over the past several years, transparency has swept the world. India and South Africa have adopted groundbreaking national freedom of information laws. China is on the verge of promulgating new openness regulations that build on the successful experiments of such major municipalities as Shanghai. From Asia to Africa to Europe to Latin America, countries are struggling to overcome entrenched secrecy and establish effective disclosure policies. More than seventy now have or are developing major disclosure policies or laws. But most of the world's nearly 200 nations do not have coherent disclosure laws; implementation of existing rules often proves difficult; and there is no consensus about what disclosure standards should apply to the increasingly powerful private sector. As governments and corporations battle with citizens and one another over the growing demand to submit their secrets to public scrutiny, they need new insights into whether, how, and when greater openness can serve the public interest, and how to bring about beneficial forms of greater disclosure. The Right to Know distills the lessons of many nations' often bitter experience and provides careful analysis of transparency's impact on governance, business regulation, environmental protection, and national security. Its powerful lessons make it a critical companion for policymakers, executives, and activists, as well as students and scholars seeking a better understanding of how to make information policy serve the public interest.



Democratizing Our Data

Author : Julia Lane

Publisher : MIT Press

Page : 187 pages

File Size : 35,20 MB

Release : 2021-10-19

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 0262542749

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Book Description

A wake-up call for America to create a new framework for democratizing data. Public data are foundational to our democratic system. People need consistently high-quality information from trustworthy sources. In the new economy, wealth is generated by access to data; government's job is to democratize the data playing field. Yet data produced by the American government are getting worse and costing more. In Democratizing Our Data, Julia Lane argues that good data are essential for democracy. Her book is a wake-up call to America to fix its broken public data system.



Transparency in International Law

Author : Andrea Bianchi

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 641 pages

File Size : 22,2 MB

Release : 2013-11-07

Category : Law

ISBN : 1107470242

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Book Description

While its importance in domestic law has long been acknowledged, transparency has until now remained largely unexplored in international law. This study of transparency issues in key areas such as international economic law, environmental law, human rights law and humanitarian law brings together new and important insights on this pressing issue. Contributors explore the framing and content of transparency in their respective fields with regard to proceedings, institutions, law-making processes and legal culture, and a selection of cross-cutting essays completes the study by examining transparency in international law-making and adjudication.



Open Government

Author : Daniel Lathrop

Publisher : "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

Page : 434 pages

File Size : 39,40 MB

Release : 2010-02-08

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1449388809

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Book Description

In a world where web services can make real-time data accessible to anyone, how can the government leverage this openness to improve its operations and increase citizen participation and awareness? Through a collection of essays and case studies, leading visionaries and practitioners both inside and outside of government share their ideas on how to achieve and direct this emerging world of online collaboration, transparency, and participation. Contributions and topics include: Beth Simone Noveck, U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer for open government, "The Single Point of Failure" Jerry Brito, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, "All Your Data Are Belong to Us: Liberating Government Data" Aaron Swartz, cofounder of reddit.com, OpenLibrary.org, and BoldProgressives.org, "When Is Transparency Useful?" Ellen S. Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, "Disrupting Washington's Golden Rule" Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org, "By the People" Douglas Schuler, president of the Public Sphere Project, "Online Deliberation and Civic Intelligence" Howard Dierking, program manager on Microsoft's MSDN and TechNet Web platform team, "Engineering Good Government" Matthew Burton, Web entrepreneur and former intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, "A Peace Corps for Programmers" Gary D. Bass and Sean Moulton, OMB Watch, "Bringing the Web 2.0 Revolution to Government" Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, "Defining Government 2.0: Lessons Learned from the Success of Computer Platforms" Open Government editors: Daniel Lathrop is a former investigative projects reporter with the Seattle Post Intelligencer who's covered politics in Washington state, Iowa, Florida, and Washington D.C. He's a specialist in campaign finance and "computer-assisted reporting" -- the practice of using data analysis to report the news. Laurel Ruma is the Gov 2.0 Evangelist at O'Reilly Media. She is also co-chair for the Gov 2.0 Expo.



Transparent Lobbying and Democracy

Author : Šárka Laboutková

Publisher : Springer Nature

Page : 281 pages

File Size : 39,9 MB

Release : 2020-02-04

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 303036044X

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Book Description

"The authors come up with some innovative tools, namely the “Catalogue of transparent lobbying”. They look at and evaluate the impact on both key stakeholders (lobbyists and targets of lobbying), monitoring of lobbying activities and sanctioning for breaches of rules. This tool holds out benchmarking capacity of sound framework for understanding of lobbying in the context of democracy, legitimacy of decision-making and accountability."David Ondráčka, member of global Board of Transparency International, head of Transparency International, Czech Republic "Transparent Lobbying and Democracy provides a comprehensive view into the phenomenon of lobbying... As a well-established scientist specializing in democracy, civil society and the public sphere, I see it as a useful and enriching contribution to the debate on lobbying, its necessary transparency and its role in the democratization process. This book has the potential to reach an international audience of experts and interested lay persons, and both complement and compete with publications on similar issues."Karel B. Müller, University of Economics in Prague, Czech Republic This book deals with the current, as yet unsolved, problem of transparency of lobbying. In the current theories and prevalent models that deal with lobbying activities, there is no reflection of the degree of transparency of lobbying, mainly due to the unclear distinction between corruption, lobbying in general, and transparent lobbying. This book provides a perspective on transparency in lobbying in a comprehensive and structured manner. It delivers an interdisciplinary approach to the topic and creates a methodology for assessing the transparency of lobbying, its role in the democratization process and a methodology for evaluating the main consequences of transparency. The new approach is applied to assess lobbying regulations in the countries of Central Eastern Europe and shows a method for how lobbying in other regions of the world may also be assessed.



Radical transparency and digital democracy

Author : Luke Heemsbergen

Publisher : Emerald Group Publishing

Page : 212 pages

File Size : 21,8 MB

Release : 2021-08-04

Category : Business & Economics

ISBN : 1800437641

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Book Description

This book tells the story of radical transparency in a datafied world. The analysis, grounded from past examples of novel forms of mediation, unearths radical change over time, from a trickle of paper-based leaks to the modern digital torrent.