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(S)electing the President : The Perils of Democracy by Michael L. Mezey is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is (S)electing the President : The Perils of Democracy about?

Selecting political leaders by popular election is an unquestioned hallmark of representative democracies—the institutional manifestation of Lincoln’s promise of a government of the people and by the people. But in 2016, Lincoln’s promise seems to have given way to Hamilton’s nightmare—with his worries that popular elections would produce demagogues who paid an "obsequious court to the people," appealing to their passions and prejudices rather than to their reason. This book examines the commitment to the widest level of participation among the largest number of citizens in the selection of the president. It looks at two salient characteristics of our current presidential election environment that bring the wisdom of this commitment into question: the declining influence of political parties and the communication revolution in the form of the internet, social media, and cable television. Ultimately, Mezey asks whether our now fully democratized presidential selection process has in fact diminished the quality of our presidential candidates and the campaigns they run, whether the turn to demagoguery that the founders feared has materialized, what the consequences of our presidential

Author

Michael L. Mezey

Publisher

Taylor & Francis Group; Routledge

Published

2018

Language

EN

ISBN

9781315450834

Subjects

Political Science, Social_sciences