How did liberal movements reshape the modern world? Origins of Liberal Dominance offers a revealing account of how states, churches, and parties joined together in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany to produce fundamentally new forms of organization that have shaped contemporary politics.
Modern political life emerged when liberal movements sought to establish elections, constitutions, free markets, and religious liberty. Yet liberalism even at its height faced strong and often successful opposition from conservatives. What explains why liberals overcame their opponents in some countries but not in others? This book compares successful and unsuccessful attempts to build liberal political parties and establish liberal regimes in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany from 1815 to World War I.
Andrew Gould argues that relations between states and churches set powerful conditions on any attempt at liberalization. Liberal movements that enhanced religious authority while reforming the state won clerical support and successfully built liberal institutions of government. Furthermore, liberal movements that organized peasant backing around religious issues founded or sustained mass movements to support liberal regimes.
Origins of Liberal Dominance offers striking new insights into the emergence of modern states and regimes. It will be of interest to political scientists, sociologists, comparative historians, and those interested in comparative politics, regime change and state-building, democratization, religion and politics, and European politics.
Andrew C. Gould is Assistant Professor of Government and Kellogg Institute Fellow, University of Notre Dame.

Douglas Kane, an American politician and economist, offers readers a straightforward, personal account of what it is like to run for and hold public office—the demands, conflicts, temptations, and rewards created by political, economic, and social forces. Throughout the book, Kane references Illinois and Wisconsin politics. The campaigns of his wife, Kathleen Vinehout, and her years in the Wisconsin senate show that the centralization of political power, the structure of campaign organizations, and the policy decisions that Kane experienced as an Illinois legislator are not unique to any one state.
 
In Our Politics Kane reflects on his nearly fifty years of active engagement in state and local politics. In a series of essays, he seeks to understand the forces, motivations, incentives and technologies that shape our politics and produce the consequences that we live with every day.  He describes how candidates and officeholders deal with the fundamental contradictions inherent in the democratic process, and how and why the political power structure has changed. He also explores the personal experience of being a legislator, from deciding how to vote to building relationships with party leaders, fellow legislators, the governor, and the voters in the district. Kane concludes by considering the possibility of change, how it might happen, and the steps that candidates, political parties, activists and others might take to better our politics with results more to our liking.
 
While many journalists record politics from the outside, and numerous political memoirs focus on personalities and what happened to whom and when, this book gives an insider’s view of politics at the level of state government. This book is not about those politicians but about our politics, which together we have created and together we must deal with.