A Thousand Steps to Parliament : Constructing Electable Women in Mongolia - Manduhai Buyandelger

A Thousand Steps to Parliament

Constructing Electable Women in Mongolia

By: Manduhai Buyandelger

Paperback | 15 November 2022 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback


RRP $53.95

$39.75

26%OFF

or 4 interest-free payments of $9.94 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 7 to 10 business days

When will this arrive by?
Enter delivery postcode to estimate

A Thousand Steps to Parliament traces how the complicated, contradictory paths to political representation that women in Mongolia must walk mirror those the world over.
 
Mongolia has often been deemed an “island of democracy,” commended for its rapid adoption of free democratic elections in the wake of totalitarian socialism. The democratizing era, however, brought alongside it a phenomenon that Manduhai Buyandelger terms “electionization”—a restructuring of elections from time-grounded events into a continuous, neoliberal force that governs everyday life beyond the electoral period. In A Thousand Steps to Parliament, she shows how campaigns in Mongolia have come to substitute for the functions of governing, from social welfare to the private sector. Such long-term, high-investment campaigns depend on an accumulation of wealth and power beyond the reach of most women candidates. Given their limited financial means and outsider status, successful women candidates instead use strategies of self-polishing to cultivate charisma and a reputation for being oyunlag, or intellectful. This carefully and intentionally crafted identity can be called the “electable self”: treating their bodies and minds as pliable and renewable, women candidates draw from the same practices of neoliberalism that have unsustainably commercialized elections. A Thousand Steps to Parliament traces how the complicated, contradictory paths to representation that women in Mongolia must walk mirror those the world over, revealing an urgent need to grapple with the encroaching effects of neoliberalism in democracies globally.
Industry Reviews
"By tracing the intricate and precarious paths to representation that women in politics in Mongolia must walk, A Thousand Steps to Parliament re-invents what it means to be a democracy in post-socialist contexts, dealing with a critical need to grapple with the loose ends of neoliberalism in our global political systems." * Inner Asia *
"A Thousand Steps to Parliament is exemplary of political anthropology at its best. Using fine-grained ethnography, detailed historiography, and compelling prose, Buyandelger demonstrates the ways in which elections are so much more than technical exercises. The result is a wholly original and completely convincing analysis of electoral politics and the making of women's electable selves. Buyandelger gifts us a set of concepts and methods for understanding postsocialist democracy that couldn't be more timely." * Jessica Greenberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign *
"In her splendid book, Buyandelger covers a wide range of subjects that are altogether fresh and new in the context of the English-language literature on Mongolia. With clear, concise language, she conveys new information about the actual practice of politics in Mongolia while also illuminating the actuality of gender politics-hitherto little studied with such attention and nuance." * Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge *

More in History

Emperor of the Seas : Kublai Khan and the Making of China - Jack Weatherford
Ancestors : A prehistory of Britain in seven burials - Alice Roberts
Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

RRP $22.99

$21.90

The Catalpa Rescue - Peter FitzSimons

RRP $36.99

$33.25

10%
OFF
Junior Atlas of Indigenous Australia - Macquarie Dictionary

RRP $39.99

$27.80

30%
OFF
Unmasking the Killer of the Missing Beaumont Children - Stuart Mullins
Dark Emu : Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture - Bruce Pascoe
The Journals of Captain Cook : Penguin Classics - James Cook
History of Western Philosophy : Routledge Classics - Bertrand Russell
The Gulag Archipelago : 1918-56 - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

RRP $37.99

$33.90

11%
OFF
Night : Penguin Modern Classics - Elie Wiesel

RRP $22.99

$17.75

23%
OFF
Churchill : Walking with Destiny - Andrew Roberts

RRP $35.00

$31.75

The Origins of Totalitarianism : Penguin Modern Classics - Hannah Arendt