This is the story of a life full of "derailments." The author might have grown up under secure circumstances, yet, even his young years were full of confusion, caused by the divorce of his parents in his very young years and full of apprehension because of he dictatorial manner with which his grandmother ruled her flock. He has to learn the true facts of life very early when he chose a profession, which, he innocently thought, would fulfill his dreams about his professional life. Reality, however, turned into twelve to fourteen hour workdays on a highly efficiently run large farm. His years of apprenticeship has hardly come to an end, when he was drafted into the army and after boot camp, he was promptly shipped to Russia, where he experienced more hardship, brutality, death and misery than most of us experience during a lifetime. Even though he was wounded several times, he survived that war in one piece, only to find upon his arrival in his hometown the Russians again as occupation troops, which led to new and sometimes dangerous problems, which convinced him to leave the "Workers" Paradise and flee to the "Golden West" in Germany. Not all was gold that glittered and the long harbored idea of emigrating eventually became reality, not without considerable obstacles. The initial years in the new homeland were a cultural shock and full of surprises. Some quite funny, others not. After nearly five years of doing what he had never thought he would be doing, he finally found his niche in the financial service business, from which he retired in 1999 and is now enjoying his "golden years." He has never regretted his decision to emigrate.
Elections are a fundamental element of democracy, since elected governments reflect voter preferences. At the same time, it is inevitable that policies pursued by any government closely resemble the preferences of some citizens, while alienating others who hold different views. Previous works have examined how institutional settings facilitate or hinder policy proximity between citizens and governments. Building on their findings, the book explores a series of "so what" questions: how and to what extent does the distance between individual and government positions affect citizens' propensity to vote, protest, believe in democracy, and even feel satisfied with their lives? Using cross-national public opinion data, this book is an original scholarly research which develops theoretically grounded hypotheses to test the effect of citizen-government proximity on three dependent variables. After introducing the data (both public opinion surveys and country-level statistics) and the methodology to be used in subsequent chapters, one chapter each is devoted to how proximity or the absence thereof affects political participation, satisfaction with democracy, and happiness. Differences in political attitudes and behavior between electoral winners and losers, and ideological moderates and radicals, are also discussed in depth.
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