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Lädt ... The Last Vote: The Threats to Western Democracy (2013)von Philip Coggan
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Can we afford to take democracy for granted? It's now so much a part of our lives that we could be forgiven for thinking it mainly takes care of itself. Almost half the world's population now lives in a democratic state, while some Western democracies have now had universal suffrage for almost a century and have endured through even the most severe of global upheavals. In The Last Vote, Philip Coggan shows how democracy today faces threats that we ignore at our own risk. Amid the turmoil of the financial crisis, high debt levels, and an ever-growing gap between the richest and the rest, it is easy to forget that the ultimate victim could be our democracy itself. Tracing democracy's history and development, from the classical world through the revolution of the Enlightenment and on to its astounding success in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Coggan revisits the assumptions on which it is founded. What exactly is democracy? Why should we value it? What are its flaws? And could we do any better? The Last Voteis a wake-up call, and an illuminating defence of a system, which, in Churchill's words, is the worst possible form of government, except for all the others that have been tried. Reasoned, lucid and balanced, Coggan's argument parrots neither the agenda of left nor right, but calls for us all to work together to ensure we don't end up in an even greater mess than we're in today. Finally, he proposes ideas for change and improvement to the system itself so the next vote we cast will not be the last. Praise for Paper Promiseswinner of Spear's Business Book of the Year Award 'This book stands way above anything written on the present economic crisis.' Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan 'Bold and confident . . . This book should be taken very seriously.' John Authers, Financial Times 'Written with a lucidity that conveys deep insights without a trace of jargon.' John Gray, New Statesman 'An excellent book . . . a smart and witty analysis.' David Wighton, The Times Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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The early stuff is great: explaining declining turnouts, increasing apathy - with data to back it up. It then pads out most of the rest of the book with fairly paint-by-numbers economic history that doesn't address the topic in the title, before returning briefly to voting systems at the end of the book. I suspect Coggan wanted to write a different book.
The biggest crime for me is the misrepresentation of the UK referendum on the alternative vote in 2011. He consistently calls it 'the UK rejecting PR' (which it wasn't). Makes me wonder how much else he got wrong in here. ( )