Politics A Unified Introduction to How Democracy Works

1. Introduction: politics and policy - what do we want to explain and how? PART 1 - PROCESSES: elections alternate party-based governments with different preferences and priorities, thus bringing public policies into line with centrist majority preferences in the long run 2. Why politics? Making policies to provide public goods 3. How popular preferences develop 4. Measuring electoral preferences 5. Electors' policy thinking: from a joined-up left-right perspective to issue-by-issue reactions 6. Party policy thinking: framing policy targets and estimating majority preferences from elections 7. Matching public policy to popular preferences 8. Opening up to populists: Using alternation theory to analyse US Policy Representation 1952-2025 PART 2 - RULES: rules designate - but may misrepresent - majority preferences, thus biasing policy outcomes 9. Majority choice of policies: voting paradoxes and attempted solutions 10. General elections and election systems: finalizing the collective choice of policies PART 3 - PROTAGONISTS: parties and governments shape popular preferences and reflect them in public policies 11. Citizens, parties and governments: interactive preference formation 12. Political parties: ideological policy carriers 13. Governments: prime participants in policymaking 14. Ministries: separating out policy areas PART 4 - STATES: collective action without binding rules 15. Globalization and world democracy 16. Challenges to a rule-based international order PART 5 - EXPLANATION: explaining politics by specifying its processes more exactly so as to predict outcomes 17. Generating 'Big Data': sources, procedures, error checks 18. Simplifying 'Big Data': dimensions, majorities and the (missing?) middle 19. Managing 'Big Data': theoretical explanation and statistical analysis 20. Developing political science by explaining democracy