front cover of Taken by Storm
Taken by Storm
The Media, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War
Edited by W. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz
University of Chicago Press, 1994
In the most comprehensive study of the media and foreign policy, twenty distinguished scholars and analysts explain the role played by the mass media and public opinion in the development of United States foreign policy in the Gulf War.

Tracing the flow of news, public opinion, and policy decisions from Sadam Hussein's rise to power in 1979, to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, through the outbreak and conclusion of the war, the contributors look at how the media have become key players in the foreign policy process. They examine the pre-war media debate, news coverage during and after the war, how the news-gathering process shaped the content of the coverage, and the media's effect on public opinion and decision makers. We see what goes on behind the scenes in the high tech world of political communication, and are confronted by troubling questions about the ways the government managed coverage of the war and captured journalists at their own news game.

Taken by Storm also examines more general patterns in post-Cold war journalism and foreign policy, particularly how contemporary journalistic practices determine whose voices and what views are heard in foreign policy coverage. At stake are the reactions of a vast media audience and the decision of government officials who see both the press and the public and key elements of the policy game.

The first book to fully integrate our understanding of the news business, public opinion, and government action, Taken by Storm transcends the limits of the Gulf War to illuminate the complex relationship between the media, the public, and U.S. foreign policy in the late twentieth century.
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Term Limits in State Legislatures
John M. Carey, Richard G. Niemi, and Lynda W. Powell
University of Michigan Press, 2000
It has been predicted that term limits in state legislatures--soon to be in effect in eighteen states--will first affect the composition of the legislatures, next the behavior of legislators, and finally legislatures as institutions. The studies in Term Limits in State Legislatures demonstrate that term limits have had considerably less effect on state legislatures than proponents predicted.
The term-limit movement--designed to limit the maximum time a legislator can serve in office--swept through the states like wildfire in the first half of the 1990s. By November 2000, state legislators will have been "term limited out" in eleven states.
This book is based on a survey of nearly 3,000 legislators from all fifty states along with intensive interviews with twenty-two legislative leaders in four term-limited states. The data were collected as term limits were just beginning to take effect in order to capture anticipatory effects of the reform, which set in as soon as term limit laws were passed. In order to understand the effects of term limits on the broader electoral arena, the authors also examine data on advancement of legislators between houses of state legislatures and from the state legislatures to Congress.
The results show that there are no systematic differences between term limit and non-term limit states in the composition of the legislature (e.g., professional backgrounds, demographics, ideology). Yet with respect to legislative behavior, term limits decrease the time legislators devote to securing pork and heighten the priority they place on the needs of the state and on the demands of conscience relative to district interests. At the same time, with respect to the legislature as an institution, term limits appear to be redistributing power away from majority party leaders and toward governors and possibly legislative staffers.
This book will be of interest both to political scientists, policymakers, and activists involved in state politics.
John M. Carey is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis. Richard G. Niemi is Professor of Political Science, University of Rochester. Lynda W. Powell is Professor of Political Science, University of Rochester.
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Think Tanks in America
Thomas Medvetz
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Over the past half-century, think tanks have become fixtures of American politics, supplying advice to presidents and policy makers, expert testimony on Capitol Hill, and convenient facts and figures to journalists and media specialists. But what are think tanks? Who funds them? What kind of “research” do they produce? Where does their authority come from? And how influential have they become?
 
In Think Tanks in America, Thomas Medvetz argues that the unsettling ambiguity of the think tank is less an accidental feature of its existence than the very key to its impact. By combining elements of more established sources of public knowledge—universities, government agencies, businesses, and the media—think tanks exert a tremendous amount of influence on the way citizens and lawmakers perceive the world, unbound by the more clearly defined roles of those other institutions. In the process, they transform the government of this country, the press, and the political role of intellectuals. Timely, succinct, and instructive, this provocative book will force us to rethink our understanding of the drivers of political debate in the United States.
[more]

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The Third Space of Sovereignty
The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations
Kevin Bruyneel
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

The imposition of modern American colonial rule has defined U.S.–indigenous relations since the time of the American Civil War. In resistance, Kevin Bruyneel asserts, indigenous political actors work across American spatial and temporal boundaries, demanding rights and resources from the government while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule over their lives. This resistance engenders what he calls a “third space of sovereignty,” which resides neither inside nor outside the U.S. political system but rather exists on its boundaries, exposing both the practices and limitations of American colonial rule. 

The Third Space of Sovereignty offers fresh insights on such topics as the crucial importance of the formal end of treaty-making in 1871, indigenous responses to the prospect of U.S. citizenship in the 1920s, native politics during the tumultuous civil rights era of the 1960s, the question of indigenousness in the special election of California’s governor in 2003, and the current issues surrounding gaming and casinos.

In this engaging and provocative work, Bruyneel shows how native political actors have effectively contested the narrow limits that the United States has imposed on indigenous people’s ability to define their identity and to develop economically and politically on their own terms.

Kevin Bruyneel is assistant professor of politics at Babson College.

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Three Capitals
St. Stephens, Huntsville, and Cahawba, 1818-1826
William H. Brantley Jr
University of Alabama Press, 1976

 "Three Capitals is an in-depth study of Alabama's first three seats of government--St. Stephens, Huntsville, and Cahawba.... The University of Alabama Press has reprinted the book in a handsome new edition with a pertinent introduction by Malcolm C. McMillan. Brantley's study is a tribute to the accomplishments of an amateur historian and contains a wealth of useful information."

--Bulletin of the History of the Early American Republic

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Three Civilizations, Two Cultures, One State
Canada’s Political Traditions
Douglas Verney
Duke University Press, 1986
This volume examines 150 years of Canadian political life in light if one of the country's most intractable problems, its cultural identity. Although many thoughtful Canadians remain dubious about the existence of a truly Canadian way of life, Douglas Verney argues that in fact Canada's political traditions embody and reflect a unique culture; and that although the Canadian government has been the primary instrument for nurturing this culture, it has been at the same time the entity most guilty of obscuring and ignoring it.
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The Timeline of Presidential Elections
How Campaigns Do (and Do Not) Matter
Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien
University of Chicago Press, 2012
In presidential elections, do voters cast their ballots for the candidates whose platform and positions best match their own? Or is the race for president of the United States come down largely to who runs the most effective campaign? It’s a question those who study elections have been considering for years with no clear resolution. In The Timeline of Presidential Elections, Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien reveal for the first time how both factors come into play.
 
Erikson and Wlezien have amassed data from close to two thousand national polls covering every presidential election from 1952 to 2008, allowing them to see how outcomes take shape over the course of an election year. Polls from the beginning of the year, they show, have virtually no predictive power. By mid-April, when the candidates have been identified and matched in pollsters’ trial heats, preferences have come into focus—and predicted the winner in eleven of the fifteen elections. But a similar process of forming favorites takes place in the last six months, during which voters’ intentions change only gradually, with particular events—including presidential debates—rarely resulting in dramatic change.
 
Ultimately, Erikson and Wlezien show that it is through campaigns that voters are made aware of—or not made aware of—fundamental factors like candidates’ policy positions that determine which ticket will get their votes. In other words, fundamentals matter, but only because of campaigns. Timely and compelling, this book will force us to rethink our assumptions about presidential elections.
[more]

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To Keep the Republic
Thinking, Talking, and Acting Like a Democratic Citizen
Elizabeth C. Matto
Rutgers University Press, 2024
American democracy is at an inflection point. With voting rights challenged, election results undermined, and even the US Capitol violently attacked, many Americans feel powerless to save their nation’s democratic institutions from the forces dismantling them. Yet, as founders like Benjamin Franklin knew from the start, the health of America’s democracy depends on the actions its citizens are willing to take to preserve it. 
 
To Keep the Republic is a wake-up call about the responsibilities that come with being a citizen in a participatory democracy. It describes the many ways that individuals can make a difference on both local and national levels—and explains why they matter. Political scientist Elizabeth C. Matto highlights the multiple facets of democratic citizenship, identifies American democracy’s sometimes competing values and ideals, and explains how civic engagement can take various forms, including political conversation. Combining political philosophy with concrete suggestions for how to become a more engaged citizen, To Keep the Republic reminds us that democracy is not a spectator sport; it only works when we get off the sidelines and enter the political arena to make our voices heard.


 
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To the Battles of Franklin and Nashville and Beyond
Stabilization and Reconstruction in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1864–1866
Benjamin Franklin Cooling
University of Tennessee Press, 2011

“Benjamin Franklin Cooling has produced a triumphant third volume to his definitive study of Tennessee and Kentucky in the Civil War. Like his first two volumes, this one perfectly integrates the home front and battlefield, demonstrating that civilians were continually embroiled in the war in intense ways comparable to and often surpassing the violence experienced by soldiers on the battlefield. The impacts of armies, guerrillas, and other military forces on civilians was continual, terrifying, and brutal in nearly all parts of the Confederacy’s Heartland.” —T. Michael Parrish, Linden G. Bowers Professor of American History, Baylor University

“Cooling’s scholarship is indeed sound and based on extensive research in a variety of original sources that range from manuscript collections to newspapers, with an exhaustive list of secondary sources. His work represents the first new interpretations of this important part of the war in decades.” —Archie P. McDonald, Regent’s Professor and Community Liaison, Stephen F. Austin State University

In two preceding volumes, Forts Henry and Donelson and Fort Donelson’s Legacy, Benjamin Franklin Cooling offered a sweeping portrayal of war and society in the upper southern heartland of Kentucky and Tennessee during the first two and a half years of the Civil War. This book continues that saga as Cooling probes the profound turmoil—on the battlefield, on the home front, within the shadow areas where lawlessness reigned—that defined the war in the region as it ground to its close.

    By 1864 neither the Union’s survival nor the South’s independence was any more apparent than at the beginning of the war. The grand strategies of both sides were still evolving, and Tennessee and Kentucky were often at the cusp of that work. With his customary command of myriad sources, Cooling examines the heartland conflict in all its aspects: the Confederate cavalry raids and Union counteroffensives; the harsh and punitive Reconstruction policies that were met with banditry and brutal guerrilla actions; the disparate political, economic, and sociocultural upheavals; the ever-growing war weariness of the divided populations; and the climactic battles of Franklin and Nashville that ended the Confederacy’s hopes in the Western Theater. Especially notable in this volume is Cooling’s use of the latest concepts of “hybrid” or “compound war” that national security experts have applied to the twenty-first-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—a mode of analysis that explores how catastrophic terrorism and disruptive lawlessness mix with traditional combat and irregular operations to form a new kind of warfare. Not only are such concepts relevant to the historical study of the Civil War in the heartland, Cooling suggests, but by the same token, their illumination of historical events can only enrich the ways in which policymakers view present-day conflicts.

    In chronicling Tennessee and Kentucky’s final rite of passage from war to peace, To the Battles of Franklin and Nashville and Beyond is in every way a major contribution to Civil War literature by a masterful historian.
 

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To the Promised Land
A History of Government and Politics in Oregon
Tom Marsh
Oregon State University Press, 2012
The first comprehensive political history of Oregon, To the Promised Land also examines the social and economic changes the state has pioneered during its almost two hundred years. Highlighting major political figures, campaigns, ballot measures,  and the history of legislative sessions, Tom Marsh traces the evolution of Oregon from incorporated territory to a state at the forefront of national environmental and social movements.

From Jason Lee’s first letter urging Congress to take possession of the Oregon Country to John Kitzhaber’s precedent-setting third term as governor, from the land frauds of the early 20th century to the state’s land-use planning goals, from the Beach Bill to the Bottle Bill, this book tells Oregon’s story.

Featuring interesting trivia, historical photographs, and biographical sketches of key politicians, To the Promised Land is an essential volume for readers interested in Oregon’s history.

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The Toddler in Chief
What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency
Daniel W. Drezner
University of Chicago Press, 2020
“It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. . . . And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.”—An anonymous senior administrative official in an op-ed published in a New York Times op-ed, September 5, 2018
 
Every president faces criticism and caricature. Donald Trump, however, is unique in that he is routinely characterized in ways more suitable for a toddler. What’s more, it is not just Democrats, pundits, or protestors who compare the president to a child; Trump’s staffers, subordinates, and allies on Capitol Hill also describe Trump like a small, badly behaved preschooler.

            In April 2017, Daniel W. Drezner began curating every example he could find of a Trump ally describing the president like a toddler. So far, he’s collected more than one thousand tweets—a rate of more than one a day. In The Toddler-in-Chief, Drezner draws on these examples to take readers through the different dimensions of Trump’s infantile behavior, from temper tantrums to poor impulse control to the possibility that the President has had too much screen time. How much damage can really be done by a giant man-baby? Quite a lot, Drezner argues, due to the winnowing away of presidential checks and balances over the past fifty years. In these pages, Drezner follows his theme—the specific ways in which sharing some of the traits of a toddler makes a person ill-suited to the presidency—to show the lasting, deleterious impact the Trump administration will have on American foreign policy and democracy.

            The “adults in the room” may not be able to rein in Trump’s toddler-like behavior, but, with the 2020 election fast approaching, the American people can think about whether they want the most powerful office turned into a poorly run political day care facility. Drezner exhorts us to elect a commander-in-chief, not a toddler-in-chief. And along the way, he shows how we must rethink the terrifying powers we have given the presidency.
 
[more]

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Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation
Jonathan Beecher Field
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Tracing the erosion of democratic norms in the US and the conditions that make it possible

Jonathan Beecher Field tracks the permutations of the town hall meeting from its original context as a form of democratic community governance in New England into a format for presidential debates and a staple of corporate governance. In its contemporary iteration, the town hall meeting models the aesthetic of the former but replaces actual democratic deliberation with a spectacle that involves no immediate electoral stakes or functions as a glorified press conference. Urgently, Field notes that though this evolution might be apparent, evidence suggests many US citizens don’t care to differentiate.

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead 

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Trading Democracy for Justice
Criminal Convictions and the Decline of Neighborhood Political Participation
Traci Burch
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The United States imprisons far more people, total and per capita, and at a higher rate than any other country in the world. Among the more than 1.5 million Americans currently incarcerated, minorities and the poor are disproportionately represented. What’s more, they tend to come from just a few of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. While the political costs of this phenomenon remain poorly understood, it’s become increasingly clear that the effects of this mass incarceration are much more pervasive than previously thought, extending beyond those imprisoned to the neighbors, family, and friends left behind.

For Trading Democracy for Justice, Traci Burch has drawn on data from neighborhoods with imprisonment rates up to fourteen times the national average to chart demographic features that include information about imprisonment, probation, and parole, as well as voter turnout and volunteerism. She presents powerful evidence that living in a high-imprisonment neighborhood significantly decreases political participation. Similarly, people living in these neighborhoods are less likely to engage with their communities through volunteer work. What results is the demobilization of entire neighborhoods and the creation of vast inequalities—even among those not directly affected by the criminal justice system.
The first book to demonstrate the ways in which the institutional effects of imprisonment undermine already disadvantaged communities, Trading Democracy for Justice speaks to issues at the heart of democracy.

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Transformations in American Legal History
Daniel W. Hamilton
Harvard University Press

Over the course of his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the questions legal historians ask. The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (1977) disclosed the many ways that judge-made law favored commercial and property interests and remade law to promote economic growth. The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960 (1992) continued that project, with a focus on ideas that reshaped law as we struggled for objective and neutral legal responses to our country’s crises. In more recent years he has written extensively on the legal realists and the Warren Court.

Following an earlier festschrift volume by his former students, this volume includes essays by Horwitz’s colleagues at Harvard and those from across the academy, as well as his students. These essays assess specific themes in Horwitz’s work, from the antebellum era to the Warren Court, from jurisprudence to the influence of economics on judicial doctrine. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American legal history.

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Treaty Politics and the Rise of Executive Agreements
International Commitments in a System of Shared Powers
Glen S. Krutz and Jeffrey S. Peake
University of Michigan Press, 2011

“Krutz and Peake’s book . . . puts another stake in the heart of the ‘imperial presidency’ argument.”
—Lisa L. Martin, University of Wisconsin–Madison, American Review of Politics

 

“Krutz and Peake reach their conclusions as a result of carefully crafted examination that might be cited as a model of political analysis of this sort . . . As [they] introduce each chapter with a summary of the argument as developed and supported to that point, the reader can enter into and understand their discussion and argument at virtually any point in the book. In sum, Treaty Politics and the Rise of Executive Agreements is a clearly written and important book that adds substantially to the existing literature on the presidency and on presidential-congressional relations.”
—Roger E. Kanet, University of Miami, International Studies Review

“One can only hope that this fine and challenging book starts an argument, or at least a dialogue, about presidential power in a post-Bush era. It merits the attention of presidency and congressional scholars, and those interested in the interaction of America’s political institutions.”
—Michael A. Genovese, Loyola Marymount University, Journal of Politics

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Trial Courts as Organizations
Brian J Ostrom, Charles W Ostrom, Jr., Roger A Hanson and Matthew Kleiman
Temple University Press, 2007

Court administrators and judges have long acknowledged that culture plays an important role in the function of trial courts. Trial Courts as Organizations provides a comprehensive framework for understanding this organizational culture, along with a set of steps and tools to assess and measure the current and preferred culture.

The authors examine how courts operate, what characteristics they may display, and how they function as a unit to preserve judicial independence, strengthen organizational leadership, and influence court performance. They identify four different types of institutional cultures using a systematic analysis of alternative values on how work is done. Each culture is shown to have its own strengths and weaknesses in achieving values, such as timely case resolution, access to court services, and procedural justice. Accordingly, the authors find judges and administrators prefer a definite pattern of different cultures, called a "mosaic," to guide how their courts operate in the future.

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A Troubled Birth
The 1930s and American Public Opinion
Susan Herbst
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Pollsters and pundits armed with the best public opinion polls failed to predict the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Is this because we no longer understand what the American public is? In A Troubled Birth, Susan Herbst argues that we need to return to earlier meanings of "public opinion" to understand our current climate.

Herbst contends that the idea that there was a public—whose opinions mattered—emerged during the Great Depression, with the diffusion of radio, the devastating impact of the economic collapse on so many people, the appearance of professional pollsters, and Franklin Roosevelt’s powerful rhetoric. She argues that public opinion about issues can only be seen as a messy mixture of culture, politics, and economics—in short, all the things that influence how people live. Herbst deftly pins down contours of public opinion in new ways and explores what endures and what doesn’t in the extraordinarily troubled, polarized, and hyper-mediated present. Before we can ask the most important questions about public opinion in American democracy today, we must reckon yet again with the politics and culture of the 1930s.
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The Truman Court
Law and the Limits of Loyalty
Rawn James
University of Missouri Press, 2021
Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of Harry S. Truman’s presidency is his judicial legacy, with even the finest of Truman biographies neglecting to consider the influence he had on the Supreme Court. Yet, as Rawn James lays out in engaging detail, president Harry Truman successfully molded the high court into a judicial body that appeared to actively support his administration’s political agenda. In rulings that sparked controversy in their own time, the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld Truman’s most contentious policies, including actions to restrict free speech, expand civil rights, and manage labor union unrest.

The Truman Court: Law and the Limits of Loyalty argues that the years between FDR’s death in 1945 and Chief Justice Earl Warren’s confirmation in 1953—the dawn of the Cold War—were, contrary to widespread belief, important years in Supreme Court history. Never before or since has a president so quickly and completely changed the ideological and temperamental composition of the Court. With remarkable swiftness and certainty, Truman constructed a Court on which he relied to lend constitutional credence to his political agenda.

 
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Trumping Religion
The New Christian Right, the Free Speech Clause, and the Courts
Steven P. Brown
University of Alabama Press, 2004

The first scholarly treatment of the strategies employed by the New Christian Right in litigating cases regarding religion

Trumping Religion provides a detailed analysis of the five major public-interest law firms that have litigated religion cases in the federal courts between 1980 and 2000. Allied with several highly vocal, evangelical ministries, such as those of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson, these legal organizations argue that religious expression is a form of protected speech and thereby gain a greater latitude of interpretation in the courts. The long-term agenda of the New Christian Right as illuminated by this study is to shape church-state jurisprudence in a way that permits free course for the Christian gospel.

Steven P. Brown presents his research and conclusions from a balanced viewpoint. In filling a distinct void in the literature, this book will be of considerable interest to political scientists, legal scholars, law schools and seminaries, and anyone concerned with the intersection of religion and judicial politics.

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Trust
Representatives and Constituents
William T. Bianco
University of Michigan Press, 1994

Why do constituents sometimes defer to their representative's judgment, rewarding her for acting as she thinks best, even when she ignores their demands? By making decisions about trust, constituents determine whether their representative is rewarded for implementing their demands or for using her judgment. These decisions shape legislator behavior and, through behavior, policy outcomes. Therefore, any attempt to explain or evaluate representative institutions such as the modern Congress requires an answer to a simple question: When do constituents trust their representative, and what is the basis of that trust?

This book is the first systematic analysis of constituent trust. It assumes that elected officials and ordinary citizens are rational actors. However, the book moves beyond the standard rational choice framework in three ways. It avoids narrow, unrealistic assumptions about motivations and information. It shows that many kinds of behavior not usually thought of as rational choices, such as a voter's desire to be represented by "someone like them," are the product of a systematic, predictable calculus---a calculus aimed at securing favorable policy outcomes. Finally, the book uses interviews with ninety-three members of the U.S. House of Representatives to test its predictions about trust.

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Turf Wars
How Congressional Committees Claim Jurisdiction
David C. King
University of Chicago Press, 1997
For most bills in American legislatures, the issue of turf—or which committee has jurisdiction over a bill—can make all the difference. Turf governs the flow and fate of all legislation. In this innovative study, David C. King explains how jurisdictional areas for committees are created and changed in Congress.

Political scientists have long maintained that jurisdictions are relatively static, changing only at times of dramatic reforms. Not so, says King. Combining quantitative evidence with interviews and case studies, he shows how on-going turf wars make jurisdictions fluid.

According to King, jurisdictional change stems both from legislators seeking electoral advantage and from nonpartisan House parliamentarians referring ambiguous bills to committees with the expertise to handle the issues. King brilliantly dissects the politics of turf grabbing and at the same time shows how parliamentarians have become institutional guardians of the legislative process.

Original and insightful, Turf Wars will be valuable to those interested in congressional studies and American politics more generally.

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Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew
Minority Rights and Procedural Change in Legislative Politics
Douglas Dion
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The use of filibusters in the U.S. Senate by small numbers of members to prevent legislative action apparently desired by a majority of the members--as evidenced by the battles over civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s--is legendary. Similar situations have existed in other legislative bodies over time. The fear that they will at some time be in the minority has inhibited actions by the majority groups to control the right of minority groups to block legislative action. And yet from time to time the majority in a legislative body has forced a change in the rules to control the rights of the minority. When does the majority seek to limit minority rights to obstruct legislation? Douglas Dion, in a unique study, develops a formal model to set out the conditions under which majorities will limit minority rights. He finds that when majorities are small, they will be more cohesive. This majority cohesion leads to minority obstruction, which in turn leads to majority efforts to force procedural change to control the ability of the minority to obstruct legislation. Dion then tests his findings in a rich consideration of historical cases from the nineteenth-century U.S. House of Representatives, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. Senate, the British House of Commons, and an account of the Austro-Hungarian Parliament written by Mark Twain.
Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew is a work that combines formal analysis with extensive historical evidence to address an important problem in democratic theory. Specialists in legislative politics and American political development, as well as those more broadly interested in the relationship between democratic theory and institutional structure, will find the work of great interest.
Douglas Dion is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan.
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Twelve Ways to Save Democracy in Wisconsin
Matthew Rothschild
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
Wisconsin, once a progressive stronghold led by Robert La Follette and others, inaugurated far-reaching reforms that broadened public involvement in civic affairs. A wave of innovative social programs aimed at making the state more egalitarian followed. In recent decades, however, the Badger State has become a laboratory for antidemocratic maneuvers that have increased the political influence of the super-rich and corporations while decreasing the power of voters.
 
From tightening campaign finance laws and banning gerrymandering to rooting out structural racism and moving toward economic equality, each chapter focuses on one of the dozen reforms that are required to heal democracy within the state. Rothschild provides an in-depth rationale for each, dismantling the counterarguments against them and exploring the complexities involved in implementing them. He offers concrete proposals and action items for grassroots organizers and concerned community advocates to restore constituent control of state politics. This pocket-sized handbook is essential for politically aware citizens as well as journalists and watchdogs who see Wisconsin as a crucial battleground state and political bellwether for the nation.
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Twilight of the American State
Pierre Schlag
University of Michigan Press, 2023

The sudden emergence of the Trump nation surprised nearly everyone, including journalists, pundits, political consultants, and academics. When Trump won in 2016, his ascendancy was widely viewed as a fluke. Yet time showed it was instead the rise of a movement—angry, militant, revanchist, and unabashedly authoritarian.

How did this happen? Twilight of the American State offers a sweeping exploration of how law and legal institutions helped prepare the grounds for this rebellious movement. The controversial argument is that, viewed as a legal matter, the American state is not just a liberal democracy, as most Americans believe. Rather, the American state is composed of an uneasy and unstable combination of different versions of the state—liberal democratic, administered, neoliberal, and dissociative. Each of these versions arose through its own law and legal institutions. Each emerged at different times historically. Each was prompted by deficits in the prior versions. Each has survived displacement by succeeding versions. All remain active in the contemporary moment—creating the political-legal dysfunction America confronts today.

Pierre Schlag maps out a big picture view of the tribulations of the American state. The book abjures conventional academic frameworks, sets aside prescriptions for quick fixes, dispenses with lamentations about polarization, and bypasses historical celebrations of the American Spirit.

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A Two Way Street
The Institutional Dynamics of the Modern Administrative State
George A. Krause
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999

One of the central questions of political science has been whether politicians control the bureaucracy, or whether the bureaucracy possesses independent authority from democratic institutions of government. Relying on advanced statistical techniques and case studies, George Krause argues instead for a dynamic system of influence—one allowing for two-way interaction among the president, congress, and bureaucratic agencies. Krause argues that politicians and those responsible for implementing policy respond not only to each other, but also to events and conditions within each government institution as well as to the larger policy environment. His analysis and conclusions will challenge conventional theoretical and empirical wisdom in the field of administrative politics and public bureaucracy.

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Two-Party Politics in the One-Party South
Alabama's Hill Country, 1874–1920
Samuel L. Webb
University of Alabama Press, 1997

A challenge to the long-held view that the only important and influential politicians in post-Reconstruction Deep South states were Democrats.

In this insightful and exhaustively researched volume, Samuel L. Webb presents new evidence that, contrary to popular belief, voters in at least one Deep South state did not flee en masse from the Republican party after Reconstruction. As Webb demonstrates conclusively, the party gained strength among white voters in Upcountry areas of northern Alabama between 1896 and 1920. Not only did GOP presidential candidates win more than a dozen area counties but Republican congressional candidates made progress in Democratic strongholds, and local GOP officials gained control of several county courthouses.

Nor were these new Republicans simply the descendants of anti-Confederate families, as some historians have claimed. Rather, they were former independents, Greenbackers, and Populists, who, in keeping with the 1890s Populist movement, were reacting against what they perceived as the control of the Democratic party by "moneyed elites" and planter landlords. Webb also breaks with previous historical opinion by showing that ex-Populists in the Hill Country, who had been radical reformers during the 1890s, remained reform minded after 1900.

Webb's ground-breaking reassessment of Alabama state politics from Reconstruction to the 1920s describes a people whose political culture had strong roots in the democratic and egalitarian Jacksonian ideology that dominated north Alabama in the antebellum period. These people carried forward elements of Jacksonianism into the late 19th century, with its tenets continuing to influence them well into the early 20th century.

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Tyranny of the Minority
The Subconstituency Politics Theory of Representation
Benjamin G. Bishin
Temple University Press, 2009

Why do politicians frequently heed the preferences of small groups of citizens over those of the majority? Breaking new theoretical ground, Benjamin Bishin explains how the desires of small groups, which he calls “subconstituencies,” often trump the preferences of much larger groups.

Demonstrating the wide applicability of his “unified theory of representation,” Bishin traces politicians' behavior in connection with a wide range of issues, including the Cuban trade embargo, the extension of hate-crimes legislation to protect gay men and lesbians, the renewal of the assault-weapons ban, and abortion politics. In the process, he offers a unique explanation of when, why, and how special interests dominate American national politics.

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