This chapter explores the democratisation of politics in India. It explains that the process of constitutional development started in the nineteenth century and culminated in the drafting and adoption of a new constitution for independent India in 1949. The founding fathers wanted India to be a liberal democracy and the constitution they adopted introduced a parliamentary system of government, universal adult suffrage, fundamental rights for all citizens and a Supreme Court to act as the guardian of the constitution. This chapter suggests that greater integration with the global economy could lead India to a more multicultural and cosmopolitan culture and a more egalitarian society.

This chapter explores the history of India's integration into the international/global economy. It discusses how foreign trade in pre-colonial times had increased the prosperity of many regions in India and how the process of industrialisation benefitted certain classes in society. It highlights the imposition of restrictions on foreign trade and foreign investment after India's independence and describes emerging opportunities in the twenty-first century in the post-liberalisation era.

This chapter examines the goals of the foreign policy of India since its independence. It highlights the influence of Jawaharlal Nehru in the early years of Indian independence and discusses how Indian foreign policy became more focused on economic issues since the late 1990s. This chapter also explains that the country's need to promote trade and investment is leading to more bilateral agreements between India and several Asian countries as well as the United States of America, the United Kingdom and many other countries.

Language change in American English started when the initial speakers of English landed in North America. During the foundational stage, founder dialects were established in regions such as Tidewater, Virginia, Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston and New Orleans, which still maintain distinct varieties. As migration patterns emerged, dialects expanded largely along an east-to-west route that is still evident to this day, but more recent changes have reflected different migratory routes, such as the south–north migration route of African Americans and the more recent movement of Northern transplants to large urban areas of the South. We consider recent shifts in vowel systems, including the development of vowels systems in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, the Northern California Vowel Shift and the weakening of the Southern Vowel Shift in Southern metropolitan areas. Finally, we examine the intersection of social and interactional factors with socio-regional space as these factors have nuanced the advancement of change in progress.

This chapter examines the ideological impact of Keynes and other economists. It considers the ‘mild tempered evolutionary idealists’ and considers the arguments social democrats of the 1930s used to promote egalitarian objectives. An important theme was now given greater prominence and theoretical sophistication in the Left's egalitarian thought: the claim that equality could be reconciled with, and indeed enhance, economic efficiency. In essence, the egalitarian social democrats of this period tried to combine the traditional ethical idealism of writers such as Tawney with the economic theory of Marshall and Keynes.

This chapter opens with a general discussion on Mike Leigh, who is considered to be Britain's greatest film director and who has carved a unique niche in the film making industry. Among his recent films, Vera Drake was released thirty-four years since his debut feature. Since his return to the cinema, he has consistently written and directed a film every two or three years, with occasional returns to the theatre, the medium in which he began his career. He was not, therefore, an obscure talent who has been waiting to be discovered. Even now more awards have come his way from abroad than at home and much of the critical response to his work in the UK has been ambivalent. The ‘breakthrough’ of Vera Drake was certainly preceded by a turning point in his reputation—and his success at the box office—with the release of Secrets and Lies in 1996, but even that came a quarter of century after Bleak Moments. He worked painstakingly with his actors to create fully rounded characters whose lives and personalities are too complex to be shoehorned into the tidy conventions of realistic drama derived from the theatrical concepts of the well-made play.

This chapter provides an account of why the EU system of governance presents such serious shortcomings in terms of political responsibility. It starts by going through the principal theories of European integration, in an effort to see what kinds of explanation could be derived from them with regard to the EU's alleged failures of political responsibility. Neo-functionalist, liberal intergovernmentalis and new institutionalist approaches are shown to yield different accounts. By adopting a historical-sociological institutionalist framework, the chapter goes on to show, more specifically, why the problems of political responsibility in the EU emerged: it looks at the legacy of Jean Monnet, whose ideas and methods for European integration exerted a strong influence upon the building of Europe. The main question that is addressed is whether there was something in Monnet's system of thought and action that could have caused problems for the development of political responsibility in the EU, insofar as the rationale behind his approach was influential in the building of the Union.

This chapter considers the depiction of Northern Protestant identity in the literature, with special emphasis on loyalists and proposed resolutions of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and draws conclusions about the reproduction of conflict from a Lacanian perspective. Peter Shirlow and Mark McGovern's presentation of the key features in the construction of the ‘Protestant People’ include the community's stress on unity over dissension, their stress on ‘British civility’ over ‘Irish barbarism’, and their removal of the Irish Other from their historiography. These are attempts at self-idealisation. Added to these, the authors note that the Protestant People see their norms and beliefs as immutable, which evokes the immutability of the imago in Lacanian psychoanalysis, which the child perceives in the mirror and confuses with itself in the mirror stage. This chapter also discusses the views of Brian Graham, Alan Finlayson, Colin Coulter, Jennifer Todd, Sarah Nelson, Anthony Kimbley, and Susan McKay. Moreover, it examines some of the rationalisations in the self-perception of the Protestant self-interpretation, as well as the function of the Catholic Other in this self-interpretation.

This chapter further discusses missile defence, although it shifts from the official strategic documents to ‘everyday’ practices, first describing the realm of the everyday as one which covers an entire network of socially embedded meaning, and then stating that NMD connects with the sphere of daily life in various ways. The next section considers the use of the image of the defence shield to describe the function of NMD and takes a look at the place where missile defence – as identity practice – is reproduced in and intersects with daily life discourses. The chapter also introduces David Tanks' analogy, where the defence system is compared to the stages of a baseball match, and the intimate correlation between popular culture and the textual practices of US foreign policy.

This chapter discusses the research design and the methods used to select areas, schools and classes. It also discusses the composition of the questionnaire, drop-out rates (internal and external), how trust was measured, the questions' validity and reliability, and practicalities related to the organisation and distribution of the questionnaire. The point of departure was that Palermo represents a case where change is least likely to occur. The project focus was on the school programme in four of Palermo's most deprived areas, as ‘the worst of the worst case scenarios’. The selected areas share several characteristics: high density of criminality and Mafia dominance, low socio-economic level and weak presence of government agencies or other associations. In the study, general questions were combined with questions about students' trust in specific groups: categories of citizens whom students did not know personally, people living in the area, Palermitans, Sicilians, Italians and foreigners. There were three general questions on trust and cooperation.

This chapter investigates the role of hospital contributory schemes as mediators of popular participation in health provision in Great Britain. It presents empirical evidence on the scope for grassroots or local involvement in decision-making and explores the structures and procedures of representation. It examines how active contributors were in the movement, in terms both of attendances in democratic forums and of the nature of the leadership which the movement selected to represent it. The analysis reveals that contributory schemes took their role as bastions of worker democracy very seriously.