Cambridge IELTS 3 provides students with an excellent opportunity to familiarise themselves with IELTS and practise examination techniques using authentic test material. This collection includes practice in the updated Speaking test (June 2001 syllabus), plus extra Reading and Writing modules for General Training candidates. The book includes an introduction to these different modules together with an explanation of the scoring system used by Cambridge ESOL. The comprehensive section of answers and tapescripts means that the material is ideal for students working partly or entirely on their own. A self-study pack (Student's Book with answers and Audio CD) is also available.

This expansive history of the origins of majority rule in modern representative government charts the emergence of majority voting as a global standard for decision-making in popular assemblies. Majority votes had, of course, been held prior to 1642, but not since antiquity had they been held with any frequency by a popular assembly with responsibility for the fate of a nation. The crucial moment in the global triumph of majority rule was its embrace by the elected assemblies of early modern Britain and its empire. William J. Bulman analyzes its sudden appearance in the English House of Commons and its adoption by the elected assemblies of Britain's Atlantic colonies in the age of the English, Glorious, and American Revolutions. These events made it overwhelmingly likely that the United Kingdom, the United States, and their former dependencies would become and remain fundamentally majoritarian polities. Providing an insightful commentary on the state of democratic governance today, this study sheds light on the nature, promise, and perils of majority rule.

Measurement and targets have been widely criticised as distorting policy and engendering gaming - yet they continue to be widely used in government. This book offers an original new account explaining the persistent appeal of performance measurement. It argues that targets have been adopted to address a crisis of trust in politics, through creating more robust mechanisms of accountability and monitoring. The book shows that such tools rarely have their intended effect. Through an in-depth analysis of UK targets on immigration and asylum since 2000, it shows that far from shoring up trust, targets have engendered cynicism and distrust in government. Moreover, they have encouraged intrusive forms of monitoring and reform in public administration, with damaging consequences for trust between politicians and civil servants. Despite these problems, performance measurement has now become embedded in techniques of public management. It has also become normalised as a way of framing policy problems and responses. Thus despite their acknowledged problems, targets are likely to retain their allure as techniques of political communication and governance.

"In mid-1975, a sickly Mao had one of the last meetings with the Politburo. During the meeting, Mao shook hands with the entire Politburo, probably for the last time in his life. When he greeted alternate Politburo member and Vice Premier Wu Guixian, Mao confessed "I don't know who you are." An embarrassed Wu said "Chairman, we met in 1964 during the national day parade." Mao compounded her embarrassment by responding "I didn't know that" (Mao 1975). It was both surprising and expected that Mao had failed to recognize Wu. On the one hand, Wu's elevation into the Politburo and into the vice premier position had been recommended by Mao himself at the 10th Party Congress less than two years before Mao shook her hand (Teiwes and Sun 2007: 101). It was therefore astonishing that Mao failed to remember the name of his hand-picked political rising star. On the other hand, Wu was far from a revolutionary veteran with whom Mao had worked for decades like Deng Xiaoping or Ye Jianying. Mao greeted those two warmly at the meeting by calling them by their nicknames, "Xiaoping" for Deng and "Old Marshal" for Ye (Mao 1975). In contrast, Wu had only joined the party in 1958 and had been nothing more than a model worker until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (Huang 2007). With the formation of the revolutionary committees at every level of governments starting in 1967, Wu found her career enjoying a rocket-like rise toward the center of power. Still, among the millions of model workers who had benefited from a class-based promotion system instituted during the Cultural Revolution, Wu's elevation to the Politburo was striking"--

China's stunning growth rates have corresponded with the rise of "state capitalism." Since the mid-2000s, China's political economy has stabilized around a model where most sectors are marketized and increasingly integrated with the global economy; yet strategic industries remain firmly in the grasp of an elite empire of state-owned enterprises. What are the implications of state capitalism for industrial competitiveness, corporate governance, government-business relations, and domestic welfare? How does China's model of state capitalism compare with other examples of state-directed development in late industrializing countries? As China enters a phase of more modest growth, it is especially timely to understand how its institutions have adapted to new challenges and party-state priorities. In this volume, leading scholars of China's economy, politics, history, and society explore these compelling issues.

Most African countries have a population composed of a multitude of language groups and most African citizens have a varied repertoire allowing them to rely on different languages for use in the home, at school, in the market, at work and in communicating with political authorities. Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa analyses the complex language scene in Africa today and asks whether this distinctive web of language use is symptomatic of the early stage of state construction. If so, one would expect that as each of these states develops there will be a rationalisation of language use and agreement on a common language within the country's borders. Alternately, Africa's language scene may be the result of a particular historical context of state construction, with the implication that political development will not lead to the one-state, one-language outcome typical of the idealised nation-state.

Nearly forty years ago the US Congress passed the landmark Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) giving the public the right to government documents. This 'right to know' has been used over the past decades to challenge overreaching Presidents and secretive government agencies. The example of transparency in government has served as an example to nations around the world spawning similar statutes in fifty-nine countries. This 2006 book examines the evolution of the move toward openness in government. It looks at how technology has aided the disclosure and dissemination of information. The author tackles the question of whether the drive for transparency has stemmed the desire for government secrecy and discusses how many governments ignore or frustrate the legal requirements for the release of key documents. Blacked Out is an important contribution during a time where profound changes in the structure of government are changing access to government documents.

Tracking trends in American public opinion, this study examines moods of public policy over time. James Stimson looks at shorter term movements as the public approves or disapproves politicians, trusts or distrusts government. His book is distinctive in that it focuses on determining the unobserved true opinion that lies beneath superficial polls. It argues that public opinion is decisive in American politics and identifies the citizens who produce influential change as a relatively small subset of the American electorate.

This book examines how ruling elites manage and manipulate their political opposition in the Middle East. In contrast to discussions of government-opposition relations that focus on how rulers either punish or co-opt opponents, this book focuses on the effect of institutional rules governing the opposition. It argues rules determining who is and is not allowed to participate in the formal political arena affect not only the relationships between opponents and the state, but also between various opposition groups. This affects the dynamics of opposition during prolonged economic crises. It also shapes the informal strategies that ruling elites use toward opponents. The argument is presented using a formal model of government-opposition relations. It is demonstrated in the cases of Egypt under Presidents Nasir, Sadat and Mubarek; Jordan under King Husayn; and Morocco under King Hasan II.

Review
"This book represents a major contribution to the resurgent study of non-democratic regimes. It is one of the first substantial pieces of modern social scientific analysis of the phenomenon, skillfully combining formal and quantitative cross-national analysis with country case studies. It will have a major impact in the study of modern authoritarian regimes."
-Miriam A. Golden, Professor of Political Science, University of California at Los Angeles
"Jennifer Gandhi's book is not just a study of dictatorship, but an important contribution to comparative politics in general. While its topic is political institutions under dictatorship, its definition of dictatorship is the residual of a prominent and widely used definition and measure of democracy, so it builds a bridge between studies of democracy and of dictatorship. Her three kinds of dictatorship and two kinds of institutions produce a rich and informative empirical analysis in which she explains variation in the longevity, policy and performance of non-democratic governments."
-William R Keech, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy, Carnegie Mellon University
"Jennifer Gandhi has written a dazzling book. With incisive theorizing, a remarkable combination of formal theory and statistical analysis, and rich case studies, Gandhi has produced one of the first systematic comparative treatments of autocracy. Two of her main conclusions are that political institutions such as legislatures and political parties enable political bargains between dictators and their potential opponents, and that these institutions have major impacts on a wide range of outcomes, including economic performance. A must-read for anyone interested in comparative politics, political regimes and the political economy of development."
-Beatriz Magaloni-Kerpel, Stanford University
"In Political Institutions under Dictatorship, Jennifer Gandhi provides important insights into the role that political parties and legislatures play in dictatorships. She disputes characterizations of these institutions as simple 'window dressing,' finding instead that political parties and legislatures can play an important role in policy formation, implementation and regime survival. The reason, she argues, is that these institutions provide an arena within which incumbents and potential opponents can forge policy compromises. Her analysis of these effects through an impressive database of dictatorships in the post-war era is clear and refreshingly frank. Political Institutions under Dictatorship is a must-read for scholars interested in authoritarian politics."
-Ellen Lust-Okar, Associate Professor of Political Science, Yale University
"Gandhi breaks new ground in this theoretically and empirically rich book on authoritarian regimes that have adopted legislative institutions. These regimes are likely to spend somewhat less on the military, have a better human rights record, and provide more benefits to workers than their autocratic counterparts. While all of this sounds positive, Gandhi warns--contrary to the linear model of progressive democratization posited in modernization theory--that partial reforms may in fact allow authoritarian governments to prolong their rule by coopting the opposition."
-Frances Rosenbluth, Yale University
"Jennifer Gandhi's book is a welcome addition to this literature."
Perspectives on Politics, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Yale University
Product Description
Often dismissed as window-dressing, nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties, play an important role in non-democratic regimes. In a comprehensive cross-national study of all non-democratic states from 1946 to 2002 that examines the political uses of these institutions by dictators, Gandhi finds that legislative and partisan institutions are an important component in the operation and survival of authoritarian regimes. She examines how and why these institutions are useful to dictatorships in maintaining power, analyzing the way dictators utilize institutions as a forum in which to organize political concessions to potential opposition in an effort to neutralize threats to their power and to solicit cooperation from groups outside of the ruling elite. The use of legislatures and parties to co-opt opposition results in significant institutional effects on policies and outcomes under dictatorship.

The People in Arms, first published in 2002, is concerned with the mass mobilization of society for war. It takes as its starting point the French levee en masse of 1793, which replaced former theories and regulations concerning the obligation of military service with a universal concept more encompassing in its moral claims than any that had prevailed under the Ancien Regime. The levee en masse has accordingly gone down in history as a spontaneous, free expression of the French people's ideals and enthusiasm. It also became a crucial source for one of the most powerful organizing myths of modern politics: that compulsory, mass social mobilizations merely express, and give effective form to, the wishes or higher values of society and its members. The aim of the papers presented here is to analyse and compare episodes in which this distinctive ideological configuration has played a leading role.

Democratic governments are able to elicit, legally and legitimately, both money and men from their populations. Certainly there is tax evasion, draft evasion, and even outright resistance; yet to a remarkable extent citizens acquiesce and even actively consent to the demands of governments, well beyond the point explicable by coercion. This is a puzzle for social scientists, particularly those who believe that individuals are self-interested, rational actors who calculate only the private egoistic costs and benefits of possible choices. The provisions of collective good should never justify a quasi-voluntary tax payment and the benefits of a war could not possibly exceed the cost of dying. This book explains the institutionalization of policy in response to anticipated and actual citizen behaviour and the conditions under which citizens give, refuse and withdraw their consent. Professor Levi claims that citizens' consent is contingent upon the perceived fairness of both the government and of other citizens. Most citizens of democracies, most of the time, are more likely to give their consent if they believe that government actors and other citizens are behaving fairly toward them.

Growing Public examines the question of whether social policies that redistribute income impose constraints on economic growth. Taxes and transfers have been debated for centuries, but only now can we get a clear view of the whole evolution of social spending. What kept prospering nations from using taxes for social programs until the end of the nineteenth century? Why did taxes and spending then grow so much, and what are the prospects for social spending in this century? Why did North America become a leader in public education in some ways and not others? Lindert finds answers in the economic history and logic of political voice, population aging, and income growth. Contrary to traditional beliefs, the net national costs of government social programs are virtually zero. This book not only shows that no Darwinian mechanism has punished the welfare states, but uses history to explain why this surprising result makes sense. Contrary to the intuition of many economists and the ideology of many politicians, social spending has contributed to, rather than inhibited, economic growth.

This volume brings together original essays by scholars working on a diverse range of empirical issues, but whose work is in each case informed by a "historical institutional" approach to the study of politics. By bringing these pieces together, the volume highlights the methodological and theoretical foundations of this approach and illustrates the general contributions it has made to comparative politics. The essays demonstrate the potential of the approach to illuminate a broad range of issues such as how and why institutions change, how political ideas are filtered through institutional structures in the formation of specific policies, and how institutional structure can have unintended effects on the shaping of policy. Through these richly detailed pieces, the reader is provided not only a thorough understanding of the method of analysis but also an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of the approach.

Why have some developing country states been more successful at facilitating industrialization than others? An answer to this question is developed by focusing both on patterns of state construction and intervention aimed at promoting industrialization. Four countries are analyzed in detail - South Korea, Brazil, India, and Nigeria - over the twentieth century. The states in these countries varied from cohesive-capitalist (mainly in Korea), through fragmented-multiclass (mainly in India), to neo-patrimonial (mainly in Nigeria). It is argued that cohesive-capitalist states have been most effective at promoting industrialization and neo-patrimonial states the least. The performance of fragmented-multiclass states falls somewhere in the middle. After explaining in detail as to why this should be so, the study traces the origins of these different state types historically, emphasizing the role of different types of colonialisms in the process of state construction in the developing world.

This book documents the conventional wisdom that Japanese workers displayed significantly more commitment to their organizations than did American workers. But as the authors point out in their new prologue, the world is very different from when this survey of U.S. and Japanese manufacturing firms first appeared; the latter are now moving closer to the American "market individualist" model. Originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1990.

Allegations of satanic child abuse became widespread in North America in the 1980s. Shortly afterwards, there were similar reports in Britain of sexual abuse, torture and murder, associated with worship of the Devil. Professor Jean La Fontaine, a senior British anthropologist, conducted a two year research project into these allegations, which found that they were without foundation. Her detailed analysis of a number of specific cases, and an extensive review of the literature, revealed no evidence of devil-worship. She concludes that the child witnesses come to believe that they are describing what actually happened to them, but that adults are manipulating the accusations. She draws parallels with classic instances of witchcraft accusations and witch-hunts in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe, and shows that beneath the hysteria there is a social movement, which is fostered by a climate of social and economic insecurity. Persuasively argued, this is an authoritative and scholarly account of an emotive issue.