BiblioVault - Books about Power Politics

Cold Anger

A Story of Faith and Power Politics

Mary Beth Rogers

University of North Texas Press, 1990

The Committee

A Study of Policy, Power, Politics and Obama’s Historic Legislative Agenda on Capitol Hill

Bryan W. Marshall and Bruce C. Wolpe

University of Michigan Press, 2021

For three years while serving as a senior adviser to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce—one of the most powerful committees in Congress—Bruce C. Wolpe kept a diary, a senior staffer’s look at how committees develop and promote legislation. With its insider’s view of the rough-and-tumble politics of cap-and-trade, healthcare reform, tobacco, oversight, and the debt ceiling agreement, The Committee uniquely melds the art of politics and policymaking with the theory and literature of political science. The authors engage with the important questions that political science asks about committee power, partisanship, and the strategies used to build winning policy coalitions both in the Committee and on the floor of the House. In this new edition, the authors revisit the relationship between the executive and Congress in the wake of the sweeping changes wrought by the Trump administration, as well as thoughts about how that relationship will change again as President Biden faces a 117th Congress that is strikingly similar to Obama’s 111th. The insider politics and strategies about moving legislation in Congress, from internal and external coalition building to a chairman’s role in framing policy narratives, will captivate both novice and die-hard readers of politics.

[more]

The Committee

A Study of Policy, Power, Politics and Obama's Historic Legislative Agenda on Capitol Hill

Bryan W. Marshall and Bruce C. Wolpe

University of Michigan Press, 2018

For three years while serving as a senior adviser to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce—one of the most powerful committees in Congress—Bruce C. Wolpe kept a diary, a senior staffer’s look at how committees develop and promote legislation. With its insider’s view of the rough-and-tumble politics of cap-and-trade, healthcare reform, tobacco, oversight, and the debt ceiling agreement, The Committee uniquely melds the art of politics and policymaking with the theory and literature of political science. The authors engage with the important questions that political science asks about committee power, partisanship, and the strategies used to build winning policy coalitions both in the Committee and on the floor of the House. The insider politics and strategies about moving legislation in Congress, from internal and external coalition building to a chairman’s role in framing policy narratives, will captivate both novice and die-hard readers of politics.

[more]

International Institutions and Power Politics

Bridging the Divide

Anders Wivel and T.V. Paul, Editors

Georgetown University Press, 2019

This book moves scholarly debates beyond the old question of whether or not international institutions matter in order to examine how they matter, even in a world of power politics. Power politics and international institutions are often studied as two separate domains, but this is in need of rethinking because today most states strategically use institutions to further their interests. Anders Wivel, T.V. Paul, and the international group of contributing authors update our understanding of how institutions are viewed among the major theoretical paradigms in international relations, and they seek to bridge the divides. Empirical chapters examine specific institutions in practice, including the United Nations, International Atomic Energy Agency, and the European Union. The book also points the way to future research. International Institutions and Power Politics provides insights for both international relations theory and practical matters of foreign affairs, and it will be essential reading for all international relations scholars and advanced students.

[more]

Masculinity, Identity, and Power Politics in the Age of Justinian

A Study of Procopius

Michael Stewart

Amsterdam University Press, 2020

A generation of historians has been captivated by the notorious views on gender found in the mid-sixth century Secret History by the Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea. Yet the notable but subtler ways in which gender coloured Procopius' most significant work, the Wars, have received far less attention. This monograph examines how gender shaped the presentation of not only key personalities such as the seminal power-couples Theodora/ Justinian and Antonina/ Belisarius, but also the Persians, Vandals, Goths, Eastern Romans, and Italo-Romans, in both the Wars and the Secret History. By analysing the purpose and rationale behind Procopius' gendered depictions and ethnicizing worldview, this investigation unpicks his knotty agenda. Despite Procopius's reliance on classical antecedents, the gendered discourse that undergirds both texts under investigation must be understood within the broader context of contemporary political debates at a time when control of Italy and North Africa from Constantinople was contested.

[more]

Power Politics

Environmental Activism in South Los Angeles

Brodkin, Karen

Rutgers University Press, 2009

In the late 1990s, when California's deregulation of the production and sale of electric power created massive energy shortages, a group of environmental justice activists blocked construction of a power plant in their working-class Mexican and Central American neighborhoods. Why did they choose this battle? And how did the largely high school student activists come to prevail in the face of statewide political opinion?

Power Politics is a rich and readable study of a grassroots campaign where longtime labor and environmental allies found themselves on opposite sides of a conflict that pitted good jobs against good air. Karen Brodkin analyzes how those issues came to be opposed and in doing so unpacks the racial and class dynamics that shape Americans' grasp of labor and environmental issues. Power Politics' activists stood at the forefront of a movement that is building broad-based environmental coalitions and placing social justice at the heart of a new and robust vision.

[more]

Power Politics

How China and Russia Reshape the World

Rob de Wijk

Amsterdam University Press, 2015

We tend to think of ourselves as living in a time when nations, for the most part, obey the rule of law - and where they certainly don't engage in the violent grabs for territory that have characterised so much of human history. But as Rob de Wijk shows in this book, power politics very much remains a force on the international scene. Offering analyses of such actions as Putin's annexation of the Crimea and China's attempts to claim large parts of the South China Sea, de Wijk explains why power politics never truly went away-and why, as the West's position weakens, it's likely to play a bigger and bigger role on the global stage in the coming years.

[more]

Sexual Bargaining

Power Politics in the American Marriage

John Scanzoni

University of Chicago Press, 1982

Is the institution of marriage in America breaking down? Is marriage as we have known it largely irrelevant? Are the forms of marriage changing? Are the changes in women's roles in society related to the breakdown, irrelevance, and formal alteration of marriage?

In this updated edition of his fundamental study of modern marriage, John Scanzoni challenges the widespread assumption that marriage is a dying institution. By analyzing the "reward seeking" which generates conflicts between males and females, he shows that marriage indeed has a future but that its form will continue to change as sex-role equality emerges both within and outside of marriage.

[more]