front cover of 101 CHAMBERS
101 CHAMBERS
CONGRESS, STATE LEGISLATURES, & THE FUTURE OF LEGISLATIVE STUDIES
PEVERILL SQUIRE
The Ohio State University Press, 2005

Although legislative studies is thriving, it suffers from one glaring weakness: a lack of truly comparative, cross-institutional research. Instead, research focuses overwhelmingly on the U.S. Congress. This unfortunate fixation limits the way scholars approach the testing of many compelling theories of legislative organization and behavior, and it ignores the invaluable research possibilities that comparison with the 99 American state legislative chambers offers.

State legislatures are easily compared to Congress: They arise out of the same political culture and history. Their members represent the same parties and face the same voters in the same elections using the same rules. And the functions and roles are the same, with each fully capable of initiating, debating, and passing legislation. None of the methodological problems found when comparing presidential system legislatures with parliamentary system legislatures arise when comparing Congress and the state legislatures.

However, while there are great similarities, there are also important differences that provide scholars leverage for rigorously testing theories. The book compares and contrasts Congress and the state legislatures on histories, fundamental structures, institutional and organizational characteristics, and members. By highlighting the vast array of organizational schemes and behavioral patterns evidenced in state legislatures, the authors demonstrate that the potential for the study of American legislatures, as opposed to the separate efforts of Congressional and state legislative scholars, is too great to leave unexplored.

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Administering Justice
Placing the Chief Justice in American State Politics
Richard L. Vining Jr. and Teena Wilhelm
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Administering Justice examines the leadership role of chief justices in the American states, including how those duties require chief justices to be part of the broader state political environment. Vining and Wilhelm focus extensively on the power of chief justices as public spokespersons, legislative liaisons, and reform leaders. In contrast to much existing research on chief justices in the states, this study weighs their extrajudicial responsibilities rather than intracourt leadership. By assessing the content of State of the Judiciary remarks delivered over a period of sixty years, Vining and Wilhelm are able to analyze the reform agendas advanced by chief justices and determine what factors influence the likelihood of success. These analyses confirm that chief justices engage with state politics in meaningful ways and that reactions to their proposals are influenced by ideological congruence with other political elites and the scope of their requests. Administering Justice also examines the chief justice position as an institution, provides a collective profile of its occupants, and surveys growing diversity among court leaders.

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Baby Ninth Amendments
How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters
Anthony B. Sanders
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Listing every right that a constitution should protect is hard. American constitution drafters often list a few famous rights such as freedom of speech, protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and free exercise of religion, plus a handful of others. However, we do not need to enumerate every liberty because there is another way to protect them: an "etcetera clause." It states that there are other rights beyond those specifically listed: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Yet scholars are divided on whether the Ninth Amendment itself actually does protect unenumerated rights, and the Supreme Court has almost entirely ignored it. Regardless of what the Ninth Amendment means, two-thirds of state constitutions have equivalent provisions, or "Baby Ninth Amendments," worded similarly to the Ninth Amendment.

This book is the story of how the "Baby Ninths" came to be and what they mean. Unlike the controversy surrounding the Ninth Amendment, the meaning of the Baby Ninths is straightforward: they protect individual rights that are not otherwise enumerated. They are an "etcetera, etcetera" at the end of a bill of rights. This book argues that state judges should do their duty and live up to their own constitutions to protect the rights "retained by the people" that these "etcetera clauses" are designed to guarantee. The fact that Americans have adopted these provisions so many times in so many states demonstrates that unenumerated rights are not only protected by state constitutions, but that they are popular. Unenumerated rights are not a weird exception to American constitutional law. They are at the center of it. We should start treating constitutions accordingly.

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Before Roe
Abortion Policy in the States
Rosemary Nossiff
Temple University Press, 2000
Few issues in contemporary U.S> politics have remained on the public agenda so long and so divisively as abortion policy. The landmark Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Waade, which held that laws prohibiting first trimester abortions were illegal because they violated a woman's right to privacy, still generates heated controversy today, a quarter of a century after it was made. The seeds of that controversy were sown in the seven years immediately preceding Roe, when state legislatures tried to reconcile religious opposition to abortion and individuals' civil liberties.

In this groundbreaking book, Rosemary Nossiff examines the force that shaped abortion policy during those years, and the ways in which states responded to them. To provide in-depth analysis while still looking broadly at the picture, she studies New York, which passed the  most permissive abortion bill in the country, and Pennsylvania, which passed one of the most restrictive. That these two states, which share similar demographic, political, and  economic characteristics, should reach two such different outcomes provides a perfect case study for observing political dynamics at the state level.

Nossiff examines the medical, religious, and legal discourses employed on both sides of the debate, as well as the role played by feminist discourse. She looks at the role of the political parties in the campaigns, as well as such interest groups as the National Council of Catholic Bishops, the Clergy Consultation Service, the National Organization for Women, and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. In addition, she analyzes the strategies used by both sides, as well as partisan and institutionalized developments that facilitated success or failure. Finally, in the Epilogue, she assesses the Roe decision and its aftermath, including an analysis of the pro-life movement in Pennsylvania.

As the author remarks, "Without question people's positions on abortion are shaped by a myriad of social, moral, and economic factors. But ultimately abortion policy is shaped in the political arena. This book examines how one of the most intimate decisions a woman makes, whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy, has become one of the most politicized issues in contemporary American politics.
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Bringing Representation Home
State Legislators among Their Constituencies
Michael A. Smith
University of Missouri Press, 2003
 “What is representation?” is a question that has been raised and discussed many times. In Bringing Representation Home, Michael A. Smith strays from the norm by asking instead, “How can we discover what representation is?” In pursuing the answer to this question, Smith focuses on what representation is in practice, not what it is in theory. Over the course of two legislative sessions, Smith interviewed and observed twelve state representatives in an effort to better understand and define their approaches to representation. He offers generalizations, but only after grounding his study in descriptions of representatives performing their jobs.
The twelve representatives are divided into four categories: Burkeans, in-district advocates, advocates beyond the district, and ombudspersons. Burkeans emphasize character and experience, advocates stress “socializing the conflict,” and ombudspersons underscore listening, responding, and compromising. Smith superbly builds his argument for this classification through an assortment of illustrative examples. He also makes a strong case that home style—the symbolic presentation that a representative makes at home in seeking political support from constituents—is a product of the interaction between the legislator’s personality and progressive ambition and the district’s characteristics and politics. Smith contends that the key to an effective representational strategy is for a representative to have not only an ideology that reflects the politics of his or her community, but also an understanding of the district’s interests, informed by interactions with organized constituencies at home.
            Smith helps personalize the legislators of this study, providing a balanced, realistic view. He also offers a new treatment of the representational roles concept, drawing on recent controversies in political science. In this context, he discusses works by Donald Searing, Richard Fenno, Burdett Loomis, and Malcolm Jewell, among others.
Because the nature of representation at the state level is such an important topic—one that will become even more important as state legislatures gain greater influence—Bringing Representation Home makes a vital contribution to political science literature. Written in an accessible and engaging style, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of legislatures and state politics. 
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Campaign Dynamics
The Race for Governor
Thomas M. Carsey
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Campaign Dynamics: The Race for Governor explores the dynamic interaction between candidates and voters that takes place during campaigns. It finds that voters respond in a meaningful way to what candidates say and do during their campaigns.
Candidates for state-wide and national offices spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours trying to convey their messages to voters. Do voters hear them and respond? More specifically, do the issues candidates stress on the campaign trail influence the choices voters make when casting their ballots? The evidence presented in this book suggests that the answer is a resounding yes.
Campaign Dynamics examines more than one hundred gubernatorial elections from 1982 through 1994, beginning with case studies of the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey in 1993. Combining interviews and observations with empirical analysis of public opinion polls, the case studies develop the basic understanding of how campaigns define the set of important issues in an election. Then the analysis is expanded to consider the abortion issue in thirty-four gubernatorial elections in 1990. Later chapters test these ideas in over one hundred gubernatorial elections, combining exit poll data on upwards of 100,000 voters from dozens of races with measures of campaign themes developed out of a content analysis of newspaper coverage.
This book employs multiple methods and sources of data and represents one of the most comprehensive theoretical and empirical efforts to understand the role of campaigns in voting behavior ever undertaken.
Campaign Dynamics will be of interest to those who study state politics, voting behavior and campaigns, and democratic theory. It should also guide students and scholars interested in performing empirical tests of formal models and those wishing to combine multiple methods in their research.
Thomas M. Carsey is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Charitable Choice at Work
Evaluating Faith-Based Job Programs in the States
Sheila Suess Kennedy and Wolfgang Bielefeld
Georgetown University Press, 2006

Too often, say its critics, U.S. domestic policy is founded on ideology rather than evidence. Take "Charitable Choice": legislation enacted with the assumption that faith-based organizations can offer the best assistance to the needy at the lowest cost. The Charitable Choice provision of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act—buttressed by President Bush's Faith-Based Initiative of 2000—encouraged religious organizations, including congregations, to bid on government contracts to provide social services. But in neither year was data available to prove or disprove the effectiveness of such an approach.

Charitable Choice at Work fills this gap with a comprehensive look at the evidence for and against faith-based initiatives. Sheila Suess Kennedy and Wolfgang Bielefeld review the movement's historical context along with legal analysis of constitutional concerns including privatization, federalism, and separation of church and state. Using both qualitative and, where possible, statistical data, the authors analyze the performance of job placement programs in three states with a representative range of religious, political, and demographic traits—Massachusetts, Indiana, and North Carolina. Throughout, they focus on measurable outcomes as they compare non-faith-based with faith-based organizations, nonprofits with for-profits, and the logistics of contracting before and after Charitable Choice.

Among their findings: in states where such information is available, the composition of social service contractor pools has changed very little. Reflecting their varied political cultures, states have funded programs differently. Faith-based organizations have not been eager to seek government contracts, perhaps wary of additional legal restraints and reporting burdens.

The authors conclude that faith-based organizations appear no more effective than secular organizations at government-funded social service provision, that there has been no dramatic change in the social welfare landscape since Charitable Choice, and that the constitutional concerns of its detractors may be valid. This empirical study penetrates the fog of the culture wars, moving past controversy over the role of religion in public life to offer pragmatic suggestions for policymakers and organizations who must decide how best to assist the needy.

[more]

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Choosing State Supreme Court Justices
Merit Selection and the Consequences of Institutional Reform
Greg Goelzhauser
Temple University Press, 2016

Since 1940, more than half of all states have switched at least in part from popular election or elite appointment to experiment with merit selection in choosing some or all of their state supreme court justices. Under merit selection, a commission—often comprising some combination of judges, attorneys, and the general public—is tasked with considering applications from candidates vying to fill a judicial vacancy. Ostensibly, the commission forwards the best candidates to the governor, who ultimately appoints them. Presently, numerous states are debating whether to adopt or abolish merit selection. 

In his short, sharp book, Choosing State Supreme Court Justices, Greg Goelzhauser utilizes new data on more than 1,500 state supreme court justices seated from 1960 through 2014 to answer the question, Does merit selection produce better types of judges? He traces the rise of merit selection and explores whether certain judicial selection institutions favor candidates who have better qualifications, are more diverse, and have different types of professional experience.

Goelzhauser’s results ultimately contribute to the broader debate concerning comparative institutional performance with respect to state judicial selection.

[more]

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Churches and States
Studies on the History of Christianity in Ukraine
Halyna Hryn
Harvard University Press
This book collects nine articles that originally appeared in the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies and that arose from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s Millennium Project, an initiative launched in the 1980s to celebrate one thousand years of the Christianization of Kyivan Rus´. The articles cover a wide array of subjects: the ecclesiastical structure of the Christian Church in Rus´ in its earliest period (Andrzej Poppe); the conflict between Orthodoxy and the Uniate Church from 1569 to 1700 (Teresa Chynczewska-Hennel); an account of the Uniate Church and the partitions of Poland (Larry Wolff); the transformation of the Greek Catholic Church under the Austrian Empire (1848–1914) (John-Paul Himka); the Greek Catholic Church in the period between the two World Wars (Andrew Sorokowski); a rethinking of the relationship of Church and society in Galician Ukraine from 1914 to 1944 (Bohdan Budurowycz); and the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine during the interwar period (Bohdan Bociurkiw). The book concludes with a bio-bibliography of Bohdan Bociurkiw, a scholar who devoted his career to the study of Ukrainian Church history (Andrii Krawchuk). These essays provide new insights and a fresh perspective to the discipline.
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Citizen Lobbyists
Local Efforts to Influence Public Policy
Brian Adams
Temple University Press, 2006
Citizen Lobbyists explores how U.S. citizens participate in local government. Although many commentators have lamented the apathy of the American citizenry, Brian Adams focuses on what makes ordinary Americans become involved in and attempt to influence public policy issues that concern them. It connects theory and empirical data in a new and revealing way, providing both a thorough review of the relevant scholarly discussions and a detailed case study of citizen engagement in the politics of Santa Ana, a mid-sized Southern California city. After interviewing more than fifty residents, Adams found that they can be best described as "lobbyists" who identify issues of personal importance and then lobby their local government bodies. Through his research, he discovered that public meetings and social networks emerged as essential elements in citizens' efforts to influence local policy. By testing theory against reality, this work fills a void in our understanding of the actual participatory practices of "civically engaged" citizens.
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CITIZENS AS LEGISLATORS
DIRECT DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES
SHAUN BOWLER
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

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COALITION GOVERNMENT, SUBNATIONAL STYLE
MULTIPARTY POLITICS IN EUROPE'S REGIONAL PARLIAMENTS
WILLIAM M. DOWNS
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

Coalition Government, Subnational Style examines parliamentary democracy in subnational legislative assemblies. Comparing three different European democracies—Germany, France, and Belgium—William M. Downs provides a powerful account of the ways politicians and political parties negotiate the composition of new governments following elections in which no single party wins a clear majority.

Downs argues that postelection alliance building is a window onto many of the political processes fundamental to representative democracy: the interpretations of electoral verdicts; the compromises of campaign pledges; the trade-offs between policy and power; the temporary cooperation between long-term adversaries; the collective decision making; and the blurring of lines of accountability through collective responsibility.

The study reports findings from an unprecedented collection of information, including cross-national survey responses, interviews with political elites, and three decades of postelection studies of coalition building in the German state parliaments, the French regional assemblies, and the Belgian provincial councils and regional parliaments. Coalition Government, Subnational Style conclusively demonstrates that the struggles for government status at subnational levels are profoundly important to both parties and voters and that the outcomes of these struggles can result in governments of varying political complexions. Downs's findings question key assumptions of democratic theory and raise important concerns about individual and organizational behavior in changing institutional and electoral environments, ultimately allowing for a deeper understanding of representation, power, and cooperation outside the more familiar arena of national parliamentary politics.

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Congress of States
Proceedings of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America
R. David Carlson
University of Alabama Press, 2023
A landmark publication of public reports that reveal the founding of the Confederate government
 
Past publications of the proceedings of the Confederate Congress have focused on the public sessions of the Regular Confederate States Congress that met in Richmond, Virginia from February 1862 to March 1865. Omitted were the formative early sessions of the Montgomery, Alabama and Richmond, Virginia Provisional Congresses of 1861 and 1862. In Congress of States, David Carlson reveals these critical early meetings.

To illuminate this pivot point in American and Southern history, Carlson has drawn on detailed and often verbatim minutes reported in Richmond, Montgomery, Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Augusta newspapers, assembling here a unique set of transcriptions that reveal the birth of the Confederate government.

Congress of States provides an introduction to the Provisional Confederate Congress and the purpose of this work relative to the Southern Historical Society’s landmark 1923 publication “Proceedings of the Confederate Congress,” which detailed the 1962–1865 Regular Confederate Congress. He also includes a chronology outlining the major events of the secession crisis, annotated minutes for the Provisional Confederate Congress’s five sessions, appendices featuring the leadership and committees of the Provisional Congress, and fascinating examples of the proposed Confederate emblem and flags debated by the delegates.

A key set of primary sources that scholars, historians, librarians, and political scientists will value for years to come, Congress of States will also be essential reading for the general reader interested in American and Southern history, the Antebellum South, and the Civil War.

 
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The Constitutionalism of American States
Edited by George E. Connor & Christopher W. Hammons
University of Missouri Press, 2008

This comparative study of American state constitutions offers insightful overviews of the general and specific problems that have confronted America’s constitution writers since the founding. Each chapter reflects the constitutional history and theory of a single state, encompassing each document’s structure, content, and evolution.

            The text is grounded in the model presented by constitutional scholar Donald S. Lutz in The Origins of American Constitutionalism so that even when a state has a relatively stable constitutional history, Lutz’s framework can be used to measure the evolving meaning of the document. With contributors drawn from state governments as well as academia, this is the first work to offer a framework by which state constitutions can be analyzed in relation to one another and to the federal Constitution.

The volume begins with chapters on the New England, Mid-Atlantic, Border, and Southern states. While regional similarities within and between the New England and Mid-Atlantic states are noteworthy, the colonial aspect of their history laid the foundation for national constitution-making. And while North and South moved in distinct directions, the Border states wrestled with conflicting constitutional traditions in the same way that they wrestled with their place in the Union.

            Southern states that seceded are shown to have had a common set of problems in their constitutions, and the post–Civil War South emerged from that conflict with a constitutionalism that was defined for it by the war’s victors. These chapters reveal that constitutional self-definition, while not evident in all of the former Confederate states, has redeveloped in the South in the intervening 140 years.

            Sections devoted to the Midwest, the Plains, the Mountain West, the Southwest, and the West reflect the special circumstances of states that arose from American expansion. Chapters describe how states of the Midwest, united by common roots in the Northwest Ordinance, wrote constitutions that were defined by that act’s parameters while reflecting the unique cultural and political realities of each state. Meanwhile, the Plains states developed a constitutionalism that was historically rooted in progressivism and populism, sometimes in the clash between these two ideologies.

Perhaps more than any other region, the Mountain West was defined by the physical landscape, and these chapters relate how those states were able to define their individual constitutional identities in spite of geography rather than because of it. And although western states borrowed heavily from those with much older constitutional traditions, the contributors reveal that they borrowed differently—and in different proportions—in order to craft constitutions that were uniquely adapted to their historical situation and peoples.

            This work demonstrates the diversity of our governmental arrangements and provides a virtual introduction to the political culture of each—many offering stories of constitutional foundings that are rich with meaning. Although these fifty documents are defined in a federal context, state constitutions are necessary to complete the constitutionalism of the United States. 

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Courts and Kids
Pursuing Educational Equity through the State Courts
Michael A. Rebell
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Over the past thirty-five years, federal courts have dramatically retreated from actively promoting school desegregation. In the meantime, state courts have taken up the mantle of promoting the vision of educational equity originally articulated in Brown v. Board of Education. Courts and Kids is the first detailed analysis of why the state courts have taken on this active role and how successful their efforts have been.

Since 1973, litigants have challenged the constitutionality of education finance systems in forty-five states on the grounds that they deprive many poor and minority students of adequate access to a sound education. While the plaintiffs have won in the majority of these cases, the decisions are often branded “judicial activism”—a stigma that has reduced their impact. To counter the charge, Michael A. Rebell persuasively defends the courts’ authority and responsibility to pursue the goal of educational equity. He envisions their ideal role as supervisory, and in Courts and Kids he offers innovative recommendations on how the courts can collaborate with the executive and legislative branches to create a truly democratic educational system.

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Creative Politics
Taxes and Public Goods in a Federal System
Glenn Beamer
University of Michigan Press, 2000
State legislators are constantly making tradeoffs between changing taxes and providing public services. Not only must they reconcile their own policy preferences with the preferences of their constituents, but they must consider the impact of actions taken by both the federal government and competing states. Glenn Beamer uses a series of in-depth case studies in eleven states to show how legislators made decisions dealing with taxation, economic development, education financing, and Medicaid.
Beamer identifies six factors that influence legislators' decisions: accountability, dependability, equity, obscurability, and horizontal and vertical transferability. Within the context created by citizen demands, intergovernmental politics, policy histories, court interventions, and state constitutions, this study analyzes how legislators employ these principles to develop and enact policies.
In addition to modeling state politics within the context of federalism, Creative Politics, reflecting the author's extensive interviews with legislators, is novel in its focus on politicians' views about public services, the strategies to finance them, and efforts to develop and maintain political support for them.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, economics, and public administration, and, more specifically, of federalism, state politics and policy, and legislative decision-making.
Glenn Beamer is Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research, University of California, Berkeley, and Assistant Professor of Government, University of Virginia.
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The Derecognition of States
Gëzim Visoka
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Although a great deal is known about the recognition of states, less is known about the practice of derecognition of states, namely why and how states withdraw the recognition of other contested and partially recognized states. The Derecognition of States offers a global and comparative outlook of this unexplored diplomatic practice. Using original empirical research, it addresses the complex processes, justifications, and consequences of state derecognition. In particular, it provides unique insights into five aspirant states facing withdrawal of recognition: Taiwan, Western Sahara, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Kosovo. 

Gëzim Visoka argues that state derecognition is a highly controversial and unstable practice that has less to do with the unfulfillment of the conditions of statehood by the claimant than with the advancement of the self-interest of the former base state and derecognizing state. The derecognition of states is not a rule; rather, it is an exception in international diplomacy, driven by political expediency and is incompatible with original rationales for granting recognition. Yet, the derecognition of states is far more important than previously recognized in shaping the reversal dynamics of secession and state creation and in influencing regional peace, geopolitical rivalries, and the international order. By analyzing the withdrawal of recognition, the book offers a window into the reversal politics of unbecoming a sovereign state and how the arbitrary beginning and the end of diplomatic relations between states take place.
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The Dimensions of Federalism
State Governments and Pollution Control Policies
William R. Lowry
Duke University Press, 1991
The resurgence of state involvement in policymaking in recent years has renewed a long-standing debate about the most effective role for states within a federal system of government. In The Dimensions of Federalism, William R. Lowry assesses and examines the responsiveness and innovation of state governments in the area of air and water pollution control policies. Building a theoretical model that demonstrates the relationship between state and federal governments, Lowry combines econometric analysis of data on all fifty states with an in-depth study of a leading state in each of four major areas of pollution policy to conclude that state policymakers will often experiment and willingly improve upon federal pollution control standards. But this willingness is tempered, he maintains, both by a fear of losing important constituents to interstate competition and by the difficulty of coordinating efforts and disseminating information without the active involvement of the federal government. Originally published in 1992, this book continues to be pertinent in a political climate that will inevitably see an increased role for states in domestic policymaking. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of American public policy, federalism, and environmental politics and policy.
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The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons
Elizabeth A. Hull, foreword by Representative John Conyers, Jr.
Temple University Press, 2006
In the 2004 presidential election, 4,686,539 Americans—a population greater than the city of Los Angeles—were barred from the polls. In a country that has extended suffrage to virtually every other class of citizen, ex-felons are the sole segment of our population deemed unworthy to exercise what the Supreme Court has called "the right preservative of all other rights," the right to vote.

The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons provides a comprehensive overview of the history, nature, and far-reaching sociological and political consequences of denying ex-felons the right to vote. Readers learn state practices in Florida and Ohio during the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections; arguments that have been used in court houses, legislatures, and the press to justify such practices; and attempts to reverse legislation through state and federal governments. In a timely appendix to the 2004 election, Elizabeth Hull makes her case that the battle for civil rights will not be won unless ex-felons, who have fulfilled their obligations to society, are restored the same rights afforded all other American citizens.
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Does Local Government Matter?
How Urban Policies Shape Civic Engagement
Elaine B. Sharp
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Until recently, policy evaluation has mostly meant assessing whether government programs raise reading levels, decrease teen pregnancy rates, improve air quality levels, lower drunk-driving rates, or achieve any of the other goals that government programs are ostensibly created to do. Whether or not such programs also have consequences with respect to future demands for government action and whether government programs can heighten—or dampen—citizen involvement in civic activities are questions that are typically overlooked.

This book applies such questions to local government. Employing policy feedback theory to a series of local government programs, Elaine B. Sharp shows that these programs do have consequences with respect to citizens’ political participation. Unlike other feedback theory investigations, which tend to focus on federal government programs, Sharp’s looks at a broad range of policy at the local level, including community policing programs, economic development for businesses, and neighborhood empowerment programs.

With this clear-eyed analysis, Sharp finds that local governments’ social program activities actually dampen participation of the have-nots, while cities’ development programs reinforce the political involvement of already-privileged business interests. Meanwhile, iconic urban programs such as community policing and broader programs of neighborhood empowerment fail to enhance civic engagement or build social capital at the neighborhood level; at worst, they have the potential to deepen divisions—especially racial divisions—that undercut urban neighborhoods.

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Educated by Initiative
The Effects of Direct Democracy on Citizens and Political Organizations in the American States
Daniel A. Smith and Caroline J. Tolbert
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"This body of research not only passes academic muster but is the best guidepost in existence for activists who are trying to use the ballot initiative process for larger policy and political objectives."
--Kristina Wilfore, Executive Director, Ballot Initiative Strategy Center and Foundation

Educated by Initiative moves beyond previous evaluations of public policy to emphasize the educational importance of the initiative process itself. Since a majority of ballots ultimately fail or get overturned by the courts, Smith and Tolbert suggest that the educational consequences of initiative voting may be more important than the outcomes of the ballots themselves. The result is a fascinating and thoroughly-researched book about how direct democracy teaches citizens about politics, voting, civic engagement and the influence of special interests and political parties. Designed to be accessible to anyone interested in the future of American democracy, the book includes boxes (titled "What Matters") that succinctly summarize the authors' data into easily readable analyses.

Daniel A. Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida.

Caroline J. Tolbert is Associate Professor of Political Science at Kent State University.


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The Evolution of American Legislatures
Colonies, Territories, and States, 1619-2009
Peverill Squire
University of Michigan Press, 2014

The institutional development of American legislatures, beginning with the first colonial assembly of 1619, has been marked by continuity as well as change. Peverill Squire draws upon a wealth of primary sources to document this institutional history. Beginning with the ways in which colonial assemblies followed the precedents of British institutions, Squire traces the fundamental ways they evolved to become distinct. He next charts the formation of the first state legislatures and the Constitutional Congress, describes the creation of territorial and new state legislatures, and examines the institutionalization of state legislatures in the nineteenth century and their professionalization since 1900.

With his conclusion, Squire discusses the historical trajectory of American legislatures and suggests how they might further develop over the coming decades. While Squire's approach will appeal to historians, his focus on the evolution of rules, procedures, and standing committee systems, as well as member salaries, legislative sessions, staff, and facilities, will be valuable to political scientists and legislative scholars.

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The Fiscal Crisis of the States
Lessons for the Future
Steven D. Gold, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 1995

As the federal government has cut back its support for domestic services, state governments increasingly have been forced to assume a leadership position. In this book, prominent experts describe and analyze how state governments in the 1990s have coped with fiscal stress through changes in tax and spending policies, as well as through attempts to "reinvent government" by abandoning long-established policies.

In an era when state budgets verge on the brink of deficit, state governments face the difficult task of reconciling the public's wish for low taxes with its desire for increased services—better schools, improved health systems, more prisons. This volume provides both a comparative overview of the fifty states as they try to meet conflicting needs and incisive case studies of six states with a reputation for being national leaders—California, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota. It explores how much substance there is to claims that states were successful in developing innovative policies.

The Fiscal Crisis of the States draws upon research to analyze what is really happening in the state capitols. Boiling down the diverse experiences of various states into a number of important lessons, this book will be a valuable resource for academics, policymakers, and public administrators, as well as the general reader, to understand the reality of state fiscal policies.

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From Ballot to Bench
Judicial Elections and the Quest for Accountability
By Philip L. Dubois
University of Texas Press, 1980

Over several decades, many U.S. states abandoned the practice of selecting their judges by direct popular election and adopted the Missouri Plan of judicial selection. In From Ballot to Bench, Philip L. Dubois subjects the various criticisms raised against judicial elections to a more searching scrutiny than previously has been attempted.

Dubois carefully reviews the three central counts on which judicial elections have been faulted: for lowering the quality of the bench, for impairing judicial independence, and for failing to secure judicial accountability. After concluding that the potential for judicial elections to hold judges popularly accountable is what might commend them over alternative selection methods, Dubois concentrates on the analysis of empirical evidence to evaluate judicial elections as mechanisms of accountability.

The study examines all the statewide partisan and nonpartisan elections for state supreme court justices in non-southern states from 1948 to 1974. Included is a detailed examination of voter participation, electoral competition, the behavior of judicial electorates, and the patterns of gubernatorial vacancy appointments. An analysis of decision making on eight state supreme courts also tests the relationship between different selection systems and judicial behavior.

Dubois finds that partisan elections maximize voter participation, meaningfully structure voter choices, minimize accession to the bench by appointment, and allow popular control over gubernatorial appointments. Additional evidence on the extent of partisan voting by judges selected under different methods leads Dubois to conclude that partisan elections are superior to both nonpartisan elections and nonelective selection methods as instruments of accountability.

The importance of the questions addressed, the breadth of the data collected, and the unorthodox conclusions offered make this a significant book for political scientists, judges, lawyers, and public officials.

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From the Capitol to the Classroom
Standards-Based Reform in the States
Edited by Susan Fuhrman
University of Chicago Press, 2001
NSSE's second centennial volume focuses on standards-based reform in the U.S.: its overall theory, means of implementation and assessing impact, the ways in which schools and teachers have responded to policy changes, and the progress and future direction of reforms.
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Gender Violence in Peace and War
States of Complicity
Sanford, Victoria
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Reports from war zones often note the obscene victimization of women, who are frequently raped, tortured, beaten, and pressed into sexual servitude. Yet this reign of terror against women not only occurs during exceptional moments of social collapse, but during peacetime too. As this powerful book argues, violence against women should be understood as a systemic problem—one for which the state must be held accountable. 
 
The twelve essays in Gender Violence in Peace and War present a continuum of cases where the state enables violence against women—from state-sponsored torture to lax prosecution of sexual assault. Some contributors uncover buried histories of state violence against women throughout the twentieth century, in locations as diverse as Ireland, Indonesia, and Guatemala. Others spotlight ongoing struggles to define the state’s role in preventing gendered violence, from domestic abuse policies in the Russian Federation to anti-trafficking laws in the United States. 
 
Bringing together cutting-edge research from political science, history, gender studies, anthropology, and legal studies, this collection offers a comparative analysis of how the state facilitates, legitimates, and perpetuates gender violence worldwide. The contributors also offer vital insights into how states might adequately protect women’s rights in peacetime, as well as how to intervene when a state declares war on its female citizens.  
 
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Global Homophobia
States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression
Edited by Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia
University of Illinois Press, 2013
While homophobia is commonly characterized as individual and personal prejudice, this collection of essays instead explores homophobia as a transnational political phenomenon. Editors Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia theorize homophobia as a distinct configuration of repressive state-sponsored policies and practices with their own causes, explanations, and effects on how sexualities are understood and experienced in a variety of national contexts. The essays cover a broad range of geographic cases, including France, Ecuador, Iran, Lebanon, Poland, Singapore, and the United States.

Combining rich empirical analysis with theoretical synthesis, these studies examine how homophobia travels across complex and ambiguous transnational networks, how it achieves and exerts decisive power, and how it shapes the collective identities and strategies of those groups it targets. The first comparative volume to focus specifically on the global diffusion of homophobia and its implications for an emerging worldwide LGBT movement, Global Homophobia opens new avenues of debate and dialogue for scholars, students, and activists.

Contributors are Mark Blasius, Michael J. Bosia, David K. Johnson, Kapya J. Kaoma, Christine (Cricket) Keating, Katarzyna Korycki, Amy Lind, Abouzar Nasirzadeh, Conor O'Dwyer, Meredith L. Weiss, and Sami Zeidan.

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Globalization and the Politics of Pay
Policy Choices in the American States
Susan B. Hansen
Georgetown University Press, 2006

In the American federal system, states actively compete for jobs, business investment, and factory locations. Labor costs have played an important role in such interstate competition since the days of the pre-Civil War plantation economy. In recent years, however, global economic trends have put added pressures on businesses and government to reduce labor costs. At least, that is what most politicians, the media, and the business community believe.

Globalization and the Politics of Pay examines the economic, political, and social causes and consequences of declining wages in the United States. It challenges the conventional wisdom that globalization is to blame for the decline in workers' earnings. Susan B. Hansen presents a comprehensive analysis of the many factors affecting labor costs and concludes that many of them result from choices made by the states themselves through the laws and policies they enact. In addition, free-market ideologies and low voter turnout have had greater effects in keeping wages down than globalization. In fact, foreign trade and investment can actually result in higher pay in the state labor market.

In this rigorous yet surprising study, Hansen develops new measures of state and federal labor costs to test competing theories of the consequences of reducing wages and benefits. Most economists would argue that higher labor costs cause higher unemployment, and that reducing labor costs will lead to higher levels of job creation. But citizens and elected officials must weigh any employment gains in lower-wage jobs against slower state economic growth, declining personal income, and a less-competitive position in international trade. Cutting state labor costs is shown to have adverse social consequences, including family instability, high crime rates, poverty, and low voter turnouts. The book concludes with policy recommendations for state governments trying to balance their need for more jobs with policies to enhance productivity, living standards, social stability, and international competitiveness.

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Governors and the Progressive Movement
David R. Berman
University Press of Colorado, 2019

Governors and the Progressive Movement is the first comprehensive overview of the Progressive movement’s unfolding at the state level, covering every state in existence at the time through the words and actions of state governors. It explores the personalities, ideas, and activities of this period’s governors, including lesser-known but important ones who deserve far more attention than they have previously been given.

During this time of greedy corporations, political bosses, corrupt legislators, and conflict along racial, class, labor/management, urban/rural, and state/local lines, debates raged over the role of government and issues involving corporate power, racism, voting rights, and gender equality—issues that still characterize American politics. Author David R. Berman describes the different roles each governor played in the unfolding of reform around these concerns in their states. He details their diverse leadership qualities, governing styles, and accomplishments, as well as the sharp regional differences in their outlooks and performance, and finds that while they were often disposed toward reform, governors held differing views on issues—and how to resolve them.

Governors and the Progressive Movement examines a time of major changes in US history using relatively rare and unexplored collections of letters, newspaper articles, and government records written by and for minority group members, labor activists, and those on both the far right and far left. By analyzing the governors of the era, Berman presents an interesting perspective on the birth and implementation of controversial reforms that have acted as cornerstones for many current political issues. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of US history, political science, public policy, and administration.

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The Governors' Lobbyists
Federal-State Relations Offices and Governors Associations in Washington
Jennifer M. Jensen
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Today, approximately half of all American states have lobbying offices in Washington, DC, where governors are also represented by their own national, partisan, and regional associations. Jennifer M. Jensen’s The Governors’ Lobbyists draws on quantitative data, archival research, and more than 100 in-depth interviews to detail the political development of this constellation of advocacy organizations since the early 20th century and investigate the current role of the governors’ lobbyists in the U.S. federal system.

First, Jensen analyzes the critical ways in which state offices and governors’ associations promote their interests and, thus, complement other political safeguards of federalism. Next, she considers why, given their apparent power, governors engage lobbyists to serve as advocates and why governors have created both individual state offices and several associations for this advocacy work. Finally, using interest group theory to analyze both material and political costs and benefits, Jensen addresses the question of interest group variation: why, given the fairly clear material benefit a state draws from having a lobbying office in Washington, doesn’t every state have one?

This assessment of lobbying efforts by state governments and governors reveals much about role and relative power of states within the U.S. federal system.

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High-Stakes Reform
The Politics of Educational Accountability
Kathryn A. McDermott
Georgetown University Press, 2011

Performance accountability has been the dominant trend in education policy reform since the 1970s. State and federal policies set standards for what students should learn; require students to take “high-stakes” tests to measure what they have learned; and then hold students, schools, and school districts accountable for their performance. The goal of these policies is to push public school districts to ensure that all students reach a common threshold of knowledge and skills.

High-Stakes Reform analyzes the political processes and historical context that led to the enactment of state-level education accountability policies across the country. It also situates the education accountability movement in the broader context of public administration research, emphasizing the relationships among equity, accountability, and intergovernmental relations. The book then focuses on three in-depth case studies of policy development in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Kathryn McDermott zeroes in on the most controversial and politically charged forms of state performance accountability sanctions, including graduation tests, direct state intervention in or closing of schools, and state takeovers of school districts.

Public debate casts performance accountability as either a cure for the problems of US public education or a destructive mistake. Kathryn McDermott expertly navigates both sides of the debate detailing why particular policies became popular, how the assumptions behind the policies influenced the forms they took, and what practitioners and scholars can learn from the successes and failures of education accountability policies.

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Hybrid Constitutions
Challenging Legacies of Law, Privilege, and Culture in Colonial America
Vicki Hsueh
Duke University Press, 2010
In Hybrid Constitutions, Vicki Hsueh contests the idea that early-modern colonial constitutions were part of a uniform process of modernization, conquest, and assimilation. Through detailed analyses of the founding of several seventeenth-century English proprietary colonies in North America, she reveals how diverse constitutional thought and practice were at the time, and how colonial ambitions were advanced through cruelty toward indigenous peoples as well as accommodation of them. Proprietary colonies were governed by individuals (or small groups of individuals) granted colonial charters by the Crown. These proprietors had quasi-sovereign status over their colonies; they were able to draw on and transform English legal and political instruments as they developed constitutions. Hsueh demonstrates that the proprietors cobbled together constitutions based on the terms of their charters and the needs of their settlements. The “hybrid constitutions” they created were often altered based on interactions among the English settlers, other European settlers, and indigenous peoples.

Hsueh traces the historical development and theoretical implications of proprietary constitutionalism by examining the founding of the colonies of Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania. She provides close readings of colonial proclamations, executive orders, and assembly statutes, as well as the charter granting Cecilius Calvert the colony of Maryland in 1632; the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, adopted in 1669; and the treaties brokered by William Penn and various Lenni Lenape and Susquehannock tribes during the 1680s and 1690s. These founding documents were shaped by ambition, contingency, and limited resources; they reflected an ambiguous and unwieldy colonialism rather than a purposeful, uniform march to modernity. Hsueh concludes by reflecting on hybridity as a rubric for analyzing the historical origins of colonialism and reconsidering contemporary indigenous claims in former settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

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Immigrants, Markets, and States
The Political Economy of Postwar Europe
James F. Hollifield
Harvard University Press, 1992

This timely study of the recent migration tides explores the political and economic factors that have influenced the rise of immigration in postwar Europe and the United States. It seeks to explain immigration in terms of the globalization of labor markets and the expansion of civil rights for marginal groups in the liberal democracies.

Immigration raises emotional issues of nationalism and citizenship. Territorial norms of community and nationhood come into conflict with the liberal ideal of free, rational individuals seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Yet immigration has been an essential ingredient in economic growth. How then can liberal states reconcile economic pressures to maintain adequate supplies of labor with political pressures to protect citizenship and safeguard rights that are accorded, in principle, to every member of society?

Three prominent democracies—France, Germany, and the United States—are chosen for study because their experience illustrates the dilemma that liberal states must face when trying to control immigration. The author carefully distinguishes differences in the factors that influence each state’s struggle to resolve the status of the “guest” worker and the “illegal” immigrant. Yet he finds that the accretion of rights for aliens and the globalization of markets have led to a convergence of immigration policies in the industrialized West.

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Indecision in American Legislatures
Jeffrey J. Harden and Justin H. Kirkland
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Lawmaking provides many opportunities for proposals to be altered, amended, tabled, or stopped completely. The ideal legislator should assess evidence, update his or her beliefs with new information, and sometimes be willing to change course. In practice, however, lawmakers face criticism from the media, the public, and their colleagues for “flip-flopping.” Legislators may also only appear to change positions in some cases as a means of voting strategically.

This book presents a systematic examination of legislative indecision in American politics. This might occur via “waffling”—where a legislator cosponsors a bill, then votes against it at roll call. Or it might occur when a legislator votes one way on a bill, then switches her vote to the other side. In Indecision in American Legislatures, Jeffrey J. Harden and Justin H. Kirkland develop a theoretical framework to explain indecision itself, as well as the public’s attitudes toward indecision. They test their expectations with data sources from American state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, and survey questions administered to American citizens. Understanding legislative indecision from both the legislator and citizen perspectives is important for discussions about the quality of representation in American politics.

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THE INDIRECT EFFECT OF DIRECT LEGISLATION
HOW INSTITUTIONS SHAPE INTEREST GROUP SYSTEMS
FREDERICK J BOEHMKE
The Ohio State University Press, 2005
Frederick J. Boehmke's book makes explicit the many consequences—intended and unintended—of having direct legislation possible in a state. Many studies of the initiative process argue that it is a flawed process that rewards wealthy interests. While evidence to support this conclusion is often drawn from a number of high-profile, high-expenditure initiative campaigns, ballot campaigns are merely one consequence of the initiative process. The ability to propose legislation directly to the people fundamentally changes the process through which citizens are represented by organized interest groups, benefiting typically underrepresented interests.

To demonstrate this, the author models the incentives that the initiative process creates for interests to organize and for how they communicate their preferences to policy makers. Interests that represent a broader range of the public are found to gain the most from the option to propose initiatives, implying that the set of organized interests in initiative states should reflect this advantage. Ironically, an effect of direct legislation is to potentially increase the effectiveness of special interest lobbying in state legislatures—in a sense, the opposite of the direct control that gives direct legislation its theoretical appeal. Yet, the clear effect is one of empowering voices that traditionally had very little effect in the legislative process. If greater representation is the goal of direct legislation, it is a clear success, even though that success does not really come in the act of ballot initiatives itself.
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The Influence of Campaign Contributions in State Legislatures
The Effects of Institutions and Politics
Lynda W. Powell
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Campaign contributions are widely viewed as a corrupting influence but most scholarly research concludes that they have marginal impact on legislative behavior. Lynda W. Powell shows that contributions have considerable influence in some state legislatures but very little in others. Using a national survey of legislators, she develops an innovative measure of influence and delineates the factors that explain this great variation across the 99 U.S. state legislative chambers.

Powell identifies the personal, institutional, and political factors that determine how much time a legislator devotes to personal fundraising and fundraising for the caucus. She shows that the extent of donors' legislative influence varies in ways corresponding to the same variations in the factors that determine fundraising time. She also confirms a link between fundraising and lobbying with evidence supporting the theory that contributors gain access to legislators based on donations, Powell's findings have important implications for the debate over the role of money in the legislative process.

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Initiatives without Engagement
A Realistic Appraisal of Direct Democracy’s Secondary Effects
Joshua J. Dyck and Edward L. Lascher, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Arguments about the American ballot initiative process date back to the Progressive Era, when processes allowing citizens to decide policy questions directly were established in about half of the states.

When political scientists began to systematically examine whether the state ballot initiative process had spillover consequences, they found the initiative process had a positive impact on civic engagement. Recent scholarship casts doubt on these conclusions, determining the ballot initiative process did not make people believe they could influence the political process, trust the government, or be more knowledgeable about politics in general. However, in some circumstances, it got them to show up at the polls, and increased interest groups’ participation in the political arena. In Initiatives without Engagement, Dyck and Lascher develop and test a theory that can explain the evidence that the ballot initiative process fails to provide the civic benefits commonly claimed for it, and the evidence that it increases political participation. This theory argues that the basic function of direct democracy is to create more conflict in society.  
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Institutional Change in American Politics
The Case of Term Limits
Edited by Karl T. Kurtz, Bruce Cain, and Richard G. Niemi
University of Michigan Press, 2009

Legislative term limits adopted in the 1990s are in effect in fifteen states today. This reform is arguably the most significant institutional change in American government of recent decades. Most of the legislatures in these fifteen states have experienced a complete turnover of their membership; hundreds of experienced lawmakers have become ineligible for reelection, and their replacements must learn and perform their jobs in as few as six years.

Now that term limits have been in effect long enough for both their electoral and institutional effects to become apparent, their consequences can be gauged fully and with the benefit of hindsight. In the most comprehensive study of the subject, editors Kurtz, Cain, and Niemi and a team of experts offer their broad evaluation of the effects term limits have had on the national political landscape.

"The contributors to this excellent and comprehensive volume on legislative term limits come neither to praise the idea nor to bury it, but rather to speak dispassionately about its observed consequences. What they find is neither the horror story of inept legislators completely captive to strong governors and interest groups anticipated by the harshest critics, nor the idyll of renewed citizen democracy hypothesized by its more extreme advocates. Rather, effects have varied across states, mattering most in the states that were already most professionalized, but with countervailing factors mitigating against extreme consequences, such as a flight of former lower chamber members to the upper chamber that enhances legislative continuity. This book is must reading for anyone who wants to understand what happens to major institutional reforms after the dust has settled."
---Bernard Grofman, Professor of Political Science and Adjunct Professor of Economics, School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine

"A decade has passed since the first state legislators were term limited. The contributors to this volume, all well-regarded scholars, take full advantage of the distance afforded by this passage of time to explore new survey data on the institutional effects of term limits. Their book is the first major volume to exploit this superb opportunity."
---Peverill Squire, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Iowa

Karl T. Kurtz is Director of the Trust for Representative Democracy at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Bruce Cain is Heller Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Director of the University of California Washington Center.

Richard G. Niemi is Don Alonzo Watson Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester.

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Interpreting State Constitutions
A Jurisprudence of Function in a Federal System
James A. Gardner
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Interpreting State Constitutions examines and proposes a solution to a problem central to contemporary debates over the enforcement of civil liberties: how courts, government officials, and lawyers should go about interpreting the constitutions of the American states.

With the Supreme Court's retreat from the aggressive protection of individual rights, state courts have begun to interpret state constitutions to provide broader protection of liberties. This development has reversed the polarity of constitutional politics, as liberals advocate unimpeded state power while conservatives lobby for state subordination to a constitutional law controlled centrally by the Supreme Court.

James A. Gardner here lays out the first fully developed theory of subnational constitutional interpretation. He argues that states are integral components of a national system of overlapping and mutually checking authority and that the purpose of this system is to protect liberty and defend against federal domination. The resulting account provides valuable prescriptive advice to state courts, showing them how to fulfill their responsibilities to the federal system in a way that strengthens American constitutional discourse.
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Investing in Nature
Case Studies of Land Conservation in Collaboration with Business
William Ginn
Island Press, 2005

In 2004, U.S. consumers spent $5.2 billion purchasing bottled water while the government only invested 5 percent of that amount to purchase critical watersheds, parks, and wildlife refuges-systems vital to clean water and healthy environments. How can we reverse the direction of such powerful economic forces?

A group of dedicated business-people-turned-environmental-entrepreneurs is pioneering a new set of tools for land conservation deals and other market-based strategies. These pragmatic visionaries have already used these methods to protect millions of acres of land and to transform the practices of entire industries. They are transforming the very nature of conservation by making it profitable.


Drawing on his vast experience in both business and land conservation at The Nature Conservancy (TNC), William Ginn offers a practical guide to these innovative methods and a road map to the most effective way to implement them. From conservation investment banking, to emerging markets for nature's goods and services, to new tax incentives that encourage companies to do the "right" thing, Ginn goes beyond the theories to present real-world applications and strategies. And, just as importantly, he looks at the lessons learned from what has not worked, including his own failed efforts in Papua New Guinea and TNC's controversial compatible development approach in Virginia. In an era of dwindling public resources and scarce charitable dollars, these tools reveal a new, and perhaps the only, pathway to achieving biodiversity goals and protecting our lands.

Conservation professionals, students of land conservation, and entrepreneurs interested in green business will find Ginn's tales of high-finance deals involving vast tracts of pristine land both informative and exciting. More than just talk, Investing in Nature will teach you how to think big about land conservation.

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Judging Inequality
State Supreme Courts and the Inequality Crisis
James L. Gibson
Russell Sage Foundation, 2021
Social scientists have convincingly documented soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality in the United States. Missing from this picture of rampant inequality, however, is any attention to the significant role of state law and courts in establishing policies that either ameliorate or exacerbate inequality. In Judging Inequality, political scientists James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson demonstrate the influential role of the fifty state supreme courts in shaping the widespread inequalities that define America today, focusing on court-made public policy on issues ranging from educational equity and adequacy to LGBT rights to access to justice to worker’s rights. 
 
Drawing on an analysis of an original database of nearly 6,000 decisions made by over 900 judges on 50 state supreme courts over a quarter century, Judging Inequality documents two ways that state high courts have crafted policies relevant to inequality: through substantive policy decisions that fail to advance equality and by rulings favoring more privileged litigants (typically known as “upperdogs”). The authors discover that whether court-sanctioned policies lead to greater or lesser inequality depends on the ideologies of the justices serving on these high benches, the policy preferences of their constituents (the people of their state), and the institutional structures that determine who becomes a judge as well as who decides whether those individuals remain in office. 
 
Gibson and Nelson decisively reject the conventional theory that state supreme courts tend to protect underdog litigants from the wrath of majorities. Instead, the authors demonstrate that the ideological compositions of state supreme courts most often mirror the dominant political coalition in their state at a given point in time. As a result, state supreme courts are unlikely to stand as an independent force against the rise of inequality in the United States, instead making decisions compatible with the preferences of political elites already in power. At least at the state high court level, the myth of judicial independence truly is a myth. 
 
Judging Inequality offers a comprehensive examination of the powerful role that state supreme courts play in shaping public policies pertinent to inequality. This volume is a landmark contribution to scholarly work on the intersection of American jurisprudence and inequality, one that essentially rewrites the “conventional wisdom” on the role of courts in America’s democracy. 
 
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Judicial Merit Selection
Institutional Design and Performance for State Courts
Greg Goelzhauser
Temple University Press, 2019

The judicial selection debate continues. Merit selection is used by a majority of states but remains the least well understood method for choosing judges. Proponents claim that it emphasizes qualifications and diversity over politics, but there is little empirical evidence regarding its performance. 

In Judicial Merit Selection, Greg Goelzhauser amasses a wealth of data to examine merit selection’s institutional performance from an internal perspective. While his previous book, Choosing State Supreme Court Justices, compares outcomes across selection mechanisms, here he delves into what makes merit selection unique—its use of nominating commissions to winnow applicants prior to gubernatorial appointment.    

Goelzhauser’s analyses include a rich case study from inside a nominating commission’s proceedings as it works to choose nominees; the use of public records to examine which applicants commissions choose and which nominees governors choose; evaluation of which attorneys apply for consideration and which judges apply for promotion; and examination of whether design differences across systems impact performance in the seating of qualified and diverse judges.

The results have critical public policy implications.

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Land Conservation Financing
Mike McQueen and Ed McMahon; The Conservation Fund
Island Press, 2003

Written by two of the nation's leading experts on land conservation, Land Conservation Financing provides a comprehensive overview of successful land conservation programs -- how they were created, how they are funded, and what they've accomplished -- along with detailed case studies from across the United States.

The authors present important new information on state-of-the-art conservation financing, showcasing programs in states that have become the nation's leaders in open-space protection: California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New Jersey. They look at key local land protection efforts by examining model programs in DeKalb County, Georgia; Douglas County, Colorado; Jacksonville, Florida; Lake County, Illinois; Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; Marin County, California; the St. Louis metro area in Missouri and Illinois, and on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

The authors then examine how hundreds of communities have created hundreds of millions of dollars in funding by developing successful campaigns to win land conservation ballot measures. They offer case studies and pull together lessons learned as they lay out how to run a successful campaign. The authors also consider the role of private foundations, which have made immense contributions to land conservation over the past two decades.

The book concludes with an examination of the emerging concept of green infrastructure -- a strategic approach to conservation that involves planning and managing a network of parks, natural areas, greenways, and working lands that can help support native species, maintain ecological processes, and contribute to the health and quality of life for America's people and its communities.

Land Conservation Financing is an indispensable resource for land conservationists in the public and private sectors who are looking for a detailed, national portrait of the state of land conservation in America today.

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Marxist Inquiries
Studies of Labor, Class, and States
Edited by Michael Burawoy and Theda Skocpol
University of Chicago Press, 1983
This collection exemplifies the resurgence of Marxist ideas in contemporary social research. Its purpose is neither to cover all the areas of Marxist research nor to survey alternative Marxist perspectives or schools. Rather the volume assembles nine examples of the most interesting work being done today by younger sociologists who are seriously pursuing the rich and provocative arguments to be found in the ongoing Marxist tradition. All contributions build upon or react to Marxist theoretical perspectives. They employ such diverse research techniques as participant observation, statistical analysis, interviewing, and the examination of archives of public documents. Among the topics covered:

– the economic bases of state policies and their determination by social and political struggles;
–  the politcal reshaping of international economic order;
– industrial work in relation to other institutions (such as education, patriarchy, and citizenship);
– the transformation of class structures in capitalist and state-socialist societies.

Published as a supplement to American Journal of Sociology, these studies constitute essential reading both for those sociologists who see Marxism as a powerful framework for understanding capitalist societies and for those who may not be committed to working within the Marxist tradition but nevertheless want to see Marxist hypotheses fully researched and debated.
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Medicaid And The Limits of State Health Reform
Michael S. Sparer
Temple University Press, 1996

With the defeat of national health reform, many liberals have looked to the states as the source of health policy innovation. At the same time, many in the new Republican majority and several governors also support increased state control. In contrast, Michael S. Sparer convincingly argues that states by themselves can neither satisfy the liberal hope for universal coverage nor the conservative hope for cost containment. He also points to two critical drawbacks to a state-dominated health care system: the variation in coverage among states and the intergovernmental tension that would inevitably accompany such a change.

Supporting his arguments, Sparer analyzes the contradictions in operations and policies between the New York and California Medicaid programs. For instance, why does New York spend an average of $7,286 on its Medicaid beneficiaries and California an average of $2,801? The answer, the author suggests, is rooted in bureaucratic politics. California officials enjoy significant bureaucratic autonomy, while the system in New York is fragmented, decentralized, and interest-group dominated. The book supports this conclusion by exploring nursing home and home care policy, hospital care policy, and managed care policy in the two states. Sparer's dissection of the consequences of state-based reform make a persuasive case for national health insurance.

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Memos to the Governor
An Introduction to State Budgeting, Second Edition, Updated
Dall W. Forsythe. Foreword by Governor Mario M. Cuomo
Georgetown University Press, 2004

With a new foreword by New York's former governor, Mario Cuomo, this revised and updated edition of Memos to the Governor is a concise guidebook that takes the reader behind governmental fiscal gobbledygook to explain in clear, understandable prose the technical, economic, and political dynamics of budget making. At all levels of government, the budget has become the battleground for policymaking and politics. This book helps current and future public administrators untangle the knotty processes of budget preparation and implementation.

Dall W. Forsythe, who served as budget director under Governor Cuomo, outlines the budgeting process through a series of memos from a budget director to a newly elected governor—a format that helps readers with little or no background to understand complicated financial issues. He covers all of the steps of budget preparation, from strategy to execution, explaining technical vocabulary, and discussing key topics including baseline budgeting, revenue forecasting, and gap-closing options.

Forsythe brings fresh insights into such issues as the importance of a multiyear strategic budget plan, the impact of the business cycle on state budgets, the tactical problems of getting budgets adopted by legislatures, and, of course, the relationship between governor and budget officer. Memos to the Governor is a painless, practical introduction to budget preparation for students of and practitioners in public administration and public-sector financial management.

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Memos to the Governor
An Introduction to State Budgeting, Third Edition
Dall W. Forsythe and Donald J. Boyd
Georgetown University Press, 2012

This revised and updated edition of Memos to the Governor is a concise and highly readable guidebook that explains in clear, understandable prose the technical, economic, and political dynamics of budget making. Updated with many new examples of budget quandaries from recent years, this book helps current and future public administrators untangle the knotty processes of budget preparation and implementation.

Authors Dall W. Forsythe and Donald J. Boyd outline the budgeting process through a series of memos from a budget director to a newly elected governor—a format that helps readers with little or no background understand complicated financial issues. They cover all of the steps of budget preparation, from strategy to execution, explaining technical vocabulary, and discussing key topics including baseline budgeting, revenue forecasting, and gap-closing options.

Forsythe and Boyd bring fresh insights into such issues as the importance of a multiyear strategic budget plan, the impact of the business cycle on state budgets, the tactical problems of getting budgets adopted by legislatures, and, of course, the relationship between governor and budget officer. Memos to the Governor is a painless, practical introduction to budget preparation for students of and practitioners in public administration and public-sector financial management.

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Motherlands
How States Push Mothers Out of Employment
Leah Ruppanner
Temple University Press, 2020

In the absence of federal legislation, each state in the United States has its own policies regarding family leave, job protection for women and childcare. No wonder working mothers encounter such a significant disparity when it comes to childcare resources in America! Whereas conservative states like Nebraska offer affordable, readily available, and high quality childcare, progressive states that advocate for women’s economic and political power, like California, have expensive childcare, shorter school days, and mothers who are more likely to work part-time or drop out of the labor market altogether to be available for their children. 

In Motherlands, Leah Ruppanner cogently argues that states should look to each other to fill their policy voids. She provides suggestions and solutions for policy makers interested in supporting working families. Whether a woman lives in a state with stronger childcare or gender empowerment regimes, at stake is mothers’ financial dependence on their partners. 

Ruppanner advocates for reducing the institutional barriers mothers face when re-entering the workforce. As a result, women would have greater autonomy in making employment decisions following childbirth.

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The Nation and the States, Rivals or Partners
William Anderson
University of Minnesota Press, 1955

The Nation and the States, Rivals or Partners was first published in 1955. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Are the states losing their self-government? What did the framers of the Constitution intend with respect to states' rights? Are federal grants-in-aid to the states a boon or a bane? Is big government too big? Are overlapping taxes a necessary evil?

These are the kinds of questions -- basic, complex, and difficult yet essential to answer -- that Professor Anderson clarifies in this handbook, which is intended for general readers as well as for students of government. The language has been kept simple and clear, and the viewpoint does not presuppose any extensive knowledge of the subject on the part of the reader.

As a member of the President's Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Professor Anderson has recognized a real need on the part of the public for a better understanding of the background issues involved in any discussion of the balance of authority, functions, and finances between the nation, the states, and the local governments of America. This book will help responsible citizens, government officials, and students of political science, history, and other social sciences to reach informed decisions on the merits of any proposals for readjustments in intergovernmental relations.

After providing the historical background for the subject and scrutinizing the current issues in fact as well as in propaganda, Professor Anderson presents a constructive program designed for the strengthening of all three levels of American government.

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National Elections and the Autonomy of American State Party Systems
James G. Gimpel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
Traditional theories of party organization have emphasized two-party electoral competition as the force behind party unity in state politics. V. O. Key first advanced this theory in Southern Politics, where he concluded that party factionalism in the South was mainly attributable to the one-party character of the region. But this traditional theory does not fit all states equally well. In the states of the West, especially, parties are competitive, but political activity is centered on candidates, not parties. The theory of candidate-centered politics allows Gimpel to explain why party factionalism has persisted in many regions of the United States in spite of fierce two-party competition. Using interviews, polling data, elections returns, and demographic information, Gimpel contends that major upheavals in the two-party balance of presidential voting may leave lower offices untouched.
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Patchwork Nation
Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics
James G. Gimpel and Jason E. Schuknecht
University of Michigan Press, 2004
The unprecedented geographic and socioeconomic mobility of twentieth-century America was accompanied by a major reshuffling of political support in many parts of the country. Yet at the dawn of the new century these local and regional movements are still poorly understood. How can we account for persistent political regionalism and the sectional changes that have radically altered the nation's political landscape, from the Sun Belt to the Rust Belt? Patchwork Nation retrieves this lost knowledge, restoring geography to its central role in our nation's political behavior.


"A primer on the importance of regional identity in the electoral system. ... [A]nyone interested in learning more about how America's diversity drives its political systems would do well to take a spin through Patchwork Nation."
---Meg Kinnard, NationalJournal.com

"Location, location, location. What matters in politics is not just who the voters are, but where they are. Just ask Al Gore. Or read this book, a compelling demonstration that geography is often destiny."
---Bill Schneider, Senior Political Analyst, CNN

"This accessible and well-written book challenges us to reflect on the role that political context plays in shaping the vote. By tracing how regional politics evolves over time within and across states, Gimpel and Schuknecht have revived the important but often neglected field of political geography."
---Donald Green, Yale University

"In the spirit of V. O. Key, Gimpel and Schuknecht make a fundamental contribution. They demonstrate that states and regions are not simply important as units of aggregation, but rather as complex political arenas with profound consequences for processes of democratic politics both within and beyond their boundaries."
---Robert Huckfeldt, University of California, Davis
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The People’s Courts
Pursuing Judicial Independence in America
Jed Handelsman Shugerman
Harvard University Press, 2012

In the United States, almost 90 percent of state judges have to run in popular elections to remain on the bench. In the past decade, this peculiarly American institution has produced vicious multi-million-dollar political election campaigns and high-profile allegations of judicial bias and misconduct. The People’s Courts traces the history of judicial elections and Americans’ quest for an independent judiciary—one that would ensure fairness for all before the law—from the colonial era to the present.

In the aftermath of economic disaster, nineteenth-century reformers embraced popular elections as a way to make politically appointed judges less susceptible to partisan patronage and more independent of the legislative and executive branches of government. This effort to reinforce the separation of powers and limit government succeeded in many ways, but it created new threats to judicial independence and provoked further calls for reform. Merit selection emerged as the most promising means of reducing partisan and financial influence from judicial selection. It too, however, proved vulnerable to pressure from party politics and special interest groups. Yet, as Shugerman concludes, it still has more potential for protecting judicial independence than either political appointment or popular election.

The People’s Courts shows how Americans have been deeply committed to judicial independence, but that commitment has also been manipulated by special interests. By understanding our history of judicial selection, we can better protect and preserve the independence of judges from political and partisan influence.

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The Politics of Social Protest
Comparative Perspectives on States and Social Movements
J. Craig Jenkins and Bert Klandermans, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

The Politics of Social Protest was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Bringing together celebrated scholars from diverse traditions and backgrounds, The Politics of Social Protest focuses on the reciprocal relationships among social movements, states, and political parties. The volume is organized around three key questions: Why do citizens resort to the often risky and demanding strategy of using disruptive protest when other channels of political intervention appear to be available? What is the relationship between social protest movements and systems of political representation? And what is the impact of the structure and development of the state on social movements themselves?

Contributors include Ronald Aminzade, University of Minnesota; Paul Burstein, University of Washington; Russell J. Dalton, University of California, Irvine; Donatella della Porta, University of Florence; Henry Dietz, University of Texas, Austin; Rachel L. Einwohner, University of Washington; Steven E. Finkel, University of Virginia; Jerrold D. Green, University of Arizona; Jocelyn Hollander, University of Washington; Hanspeter Kriesi, University of Geneva; Diarmuid Maguire, University of Sydney; Bronislaw Misztal, Indiana University, Fort Wayne; Edward N. Muller, University of Arizona; Michael Nollert, University of Trier; Karl-Dieter Opp, University of Hamburg; Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin; Michael Wallace, Indiana University; and Gadi Wolfsfeld, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

J. Craig Jenkins is professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. He is the author of The Politics of Insurgency: The Farm Worker Movement of the 1960's (1985).

Bert Klandermans is professor of applied social psychology at Free University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has published widely on social movements in journals such as the American Sociological Review, Sociological Forum, and the European Journal of Social Psychology. He is the editor of the Social Movements, Protest, and Contention series for the University of Minnesota Press.

Copublished with UCL Press, London.

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Power, Knowledge, and Politics
Policy Analysis in the States
John A. Hird
Georgetown University Press, 2005

If knowledge is power, then John Hird has opened the doors for anyone interested in public policymaking and policy analysis on the state level. A beginning question might be: does politics put gasoline or sugar in the tank? More specifically, in a highly partisan political environment, is nonpartisan expertise useful to policymaking? Do policy analysts play a meaningful role in decision making? Does policy expertise promote democratic decision making? Does it vest power in an unelected and unaccountable elite, or does it become co-opted by political actors and circumstances? Is it used to make substantive changes or just for window-dressing?

In a unique comparative focus on state policy, Power, Knowledge, and Politics dissects the nature of the policy institutions that policymakers establish and analyzes the connection between policy research and how it is actually used in decision making. Hird probes the effects of politics and political institutions—parties, state political culture and dynamics, legislative and gubernatorial staffing, partisan think tanks, interest groups—on the nature and conduct of nonpartisan policy analysis. Through a comparative examination of institutions and testing theories of the use of policy analysis, Hird draws conclusions that are more useful than those derived from single cases.

Hird examines nonpartisan policy research organizations established by and operating in U.S. state legislatures—one of the most intense of political environments—to determine whether and how nonpartisan policy research can survive in that harsh climate. By first detailing how nonpartisan policy analysis organizations came to be and what they do, and then determining what state legislators want from them, he presents a rigorous statistical analysis of those agencies in all 50 states and from a survey of 800 state legislators. This thoroughly comprehensive look at policymaking at the state level concludes that nonpartisan policy analysis institutions can play an important role—as long as they remain scrupulously nonpartisan.

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A Prelude to the Welfare State
The Origins of Workers' Compensation
Price V. Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Workers' compensation was arguably the first widespread social insurance program in the United States and the most successful form of labor legislation to emerge from the early Progressive Movement. Adopted in most states between 1910 and 1920, workers' compensation laws have been paving seen as the way for social security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and eventually the broad network of social welfare programs we have today.

In this highly original and persuasive work, Price V. Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor challenge widespread historical perceptions, arguing that, rather than being an early progressive victory, workers' compensation succeeded because all relevant parties—labor and management, insurance companies, lawyers, and legislators—benefited from the legislation. Thorough, rigorous, and convincing, A Prelude to the Welfare State: The Origins of Workers' Compensation is a major reappraisal of the causes and consequences of a movement that ultimately transformed the nature of social insurance and the American workplace.
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Public Budgeting in the United States
The Cultural and Ideological Setting
Steven G. Koven
Georgetown University Press, 1999

Budgeting has long been considered a rational process using neutral tools of financial management, but this outlook fails to consider the outside influences on leaders’ behavior. Steven G. Koven shows that political culture (moralistic, traditionalistic, individualistic) and ideological orientations (liberal vs. conservative) are at least as important as financial tools in shaping budgets.

Koven examines budget formation at the national, state, and local levels to demonstrate the strong influence of attitudes about how public money should be generated and spent. In addition to statistical data, the book includes recent case studies: the 1997 budget agreement; Governor George W. Bush’s use of the budget process to advance a conservative policy agenda in the state of Texas; and Mayor Marion Barry’s abuses of power in Washington, D.C.

Koven demonstrates that administrative principles are at best an incomplete guide for public officials and that budgeters must learn to interpret signals from the political environment.

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Radicalism in the States
The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the American Political Economy
Richard M. Valelly
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Concentrated in states outside the Northeast and the South, state-level third-party radical politics has been more widespread than many realize. In the 1920s and 1930s, American political organizations strong enough to mount state-wide campaigns, and often capable of electing governors and members of Congress, emerged not only in Minnesota but in Wisconsin and Washington, in Oklahoma and Idaho, and in several other states.

Richard M. Valelly treats in detail the political economy of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party (1918-1944), the most successful radical, state-level party in American history. With the aid of numerous interviews of surviving organizers and participants in the party's existence, Valelly recreates the party's rise to power and subsequent decline, seeking answers to some broad, developmental questions. Why did this type of politics arise, and why did it collapse when it did? What does the party's history tell us about national political change? The answers lie, Valelly argues, in America's transition from the political economy of the 1920s to the New Deal. Combining case study and comparative state politics, he reexamines America's political economy prior to the New Deal and the scope and ironies of the New Deal's reorganization of American politics. The results compellingly support his argument that the federal government's increasing intervention in the economy profoundly transformed state politics. The interplay between national economy policy-making and federalism eventually reshaped the dynamics of interest-group politics and closed off the future of "state-level radicalism." The strength of this argument is highlighted by Valelly's cross-national comparison with Canadian politics. In vivid contrast to the fate of American movements, "province level radicalism" thrived in the Canadian political environment.

In the course of analyzing one of the "supressed alternatives" of American politics, Valelly illuminates the influence of the national political economy on American political development. Radicalism in the States will interest students of economic protest, of national policy-making, of interest-group politics and party politics.
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Reforming Legislatures
American Voters and State Ballot Measures, 1792-2020
Peverill Squire
University of Missouri Press, 2024
Legislatures are ubiquitous in the American political experience. First created in Virginia in 1619, they have existed continuously ever since. Indeed, they were established in even the most unlikely of places, notably in sparsely populated frontier settlements, and functioned as the focal point of every governing system devised.
 
Despite the ubiquity of state legislatures, we know remarkably little about how Americans have viewed them as organizations, in terms of their structures, rules, and procedures. But with the rise of modern public opinion surveys in the twentieth century, we now have extensive data on how Americans have gauged legislative performance throughout the many years. That said, the responses to the questions pollsters typically pose reflect partisanship, policy, and personality. Generally, respondents respond favorably to legislatures controlled by their own political party and those in power during good economic times. Incumbent lawmakers get ratings boosts from having personalities, “home styles” that mesh with those of their constituents. These relationships are important indicators of people’s thoughts regarding the current performance of their legislatures and legislators, but they tell us nothing about attitudes toward the institution and its organizational characteristics.
 
This study offers a unique perspective on what American voters have historically thought about legislatures as organizations and legislators as representatives. Rather than focusing on responses to surveys that ask respondents how they rate the current performance of lawmakers and legislatures, this study leverages the most significant difference between national and state politics: the existence of ballot propositions in the latter. At the national level Americans have never had any say over Congress’s structure, rules, or procedures. In contrast, at the state level they have had ample opportunities over the course of more than two centuries to shape their state legislatures. The data examined here look at how people have voted on more than 1,500 state ballot propositions targeting a wide array of legislative organizational and parliamentary features. By linking the votes on these measures with the public debates preceding them, this study documents not only how American viewed various aspects of their legislatures, but also whether their opinions held constant or shifted over time. The findings reported paint a more nuanced picture of Americans’ attitudes toward legislatures than the prevailing one derived from survey research. When presented with legislative reform measures on which concrete choices were offered and decisions on them had to be made, the analyses presented here reveal that, counter to the conventional wisdom that people loved their representatives but hated the legislature, voters usually took charitable positions toward the institution while harboring skeptical attitudes about lawmakers’ motives and behaviors.
 
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Reimagining Courts
A Design for the Twenty-First Century
Victor E Flango
Temple University Press, 2017
In their timely and topical book, Reimagining Courts, Victor Flango and Thomas Clarke argue that courts are a victim of their own success. Disputes that once were resolved either informally in the family or within the community are now handled mainly by courts, which strains government agency resources. The authors offer provocative suggestions for a thorough overhaul of American state and local courts, one that better fits the needs of a twenty-first century legal system.
 
Reimagining Courts recommends a triage process based upon case characteristics, litigant goals, and resolution processes. Courts must fundamentally reorganize their business processes around the concept of the litigant as a customer.  Each adjudication process that the authors propose requires a different case management process and different amounts of judicial, staff, and facility resources. 
 
Reimagining Courts should spark much-needed debate. This book will be of significant interest to lawyers, judges, and professionals in the court system as well as to scholars in public administration and political science.   
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Rethinking Health Care Policy
The New Politics of State Regulation
Robert B. Hackey
Georgetown University Press, 1998

States are increasingly important players in the current efforts to reform U.S. health care, as the federal government withdraws from this responsibility. Robert B. Hackey analyzes the varied routes states have taken in reformulating health care policy and provides a road map of what specific strategies work and why.

In this comparative case study, Hackey focuses on four states—Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Rhode Island—that have had markedly different experiences with regulating health care over the past two decades. Hackey's detailed comparisons show how the states' policies changed over time, moving from regulatory to market-oriented solutions, and examines which policy programs appear best poised to meet the future.

Hackey uses regime theory to explain how the states' policy choices concerning cost control and entry regulation were shaped by the prevailing political culture and institution of each state. He concludes that the autonomy of state government form special interests is vital to the successful adoption, implementation and outcome of state initiatives.

Rethinking Health Care Policy offers policymakers, planners and specialists useful insights into the politics of state regulation and into future directions for health care reform.

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The Right of Instruction and Representation in American Legislatures, 1778 to 1900
Peverill Squire
University of Michigan Press, 2021
The Right of Instruction and Representation in American Legislatures, 1778 to 1900 provides a comprehensive analysis of the role constituent instructions played in American politics for more than a hundred years after its founding. Constituent instructions were more widely issued than previously thought, and members of state legislatures and Congress were more likely to obey them than political scientists and historians have assumed. Peverill Squire expands our understanding of constituent instructions beyond a handful of high-profile cases, through analyses of two unique data sets: one examining more than 5,000 actionable communications (instructions and requests) sent to state legislators by constituents through town meetings, mass meetings, and local representative bodies; the other examines more than 6,600 actionable communications directed by state legislatures to their state’s congressional delegations. He draws the data, examples, and quotes almost entirely from original sources, including government documents such as legislative journals, session laws, town and county records, and newspaper stories, as well as diaries, memoirs, and other contemporary sources. Squire also includes instructions to and from Confederate state legislatures in both data sets. In every respect, the Confederate state legislatures mirrored the legislatures that preceded and followed them.
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The Rise of the Entrepreneurial State
State and Local Economic Development Policy in the United States
Peter K. Eisinger
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989
The Rise of the Entrepreneurial State charts the development of state and local government initiatives to influence the market and strengthen economic development policies. This trend marked a decisive break from governments’ traditionally small role in the affairs of private industry that defined the relationship between the public and private sector for the first half of the twentieth century. The turn to state and local government intervention signaled a change in subnational politics that, in many ways, transcended partisan politics, regional distinctions ,and racial alliances.

Eisinger’s meticulous research uncovers state and local governments’ transition from supply-side to demand-side strategies of market creation. He shows that, instead of relying solely on the supply-side strategies of tax breaks and other incentives to encourage business relocation, some governments promoted innovation and the creation of new business approaches.
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The Rise of the Representative
Lawmakers and Constituents in Colonial America
Peverill Squire
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Representation is integral to the study of legislatures, yet virtually no attention has been given to how representative assemblies developed and what that process might tell us about how the relationship between the representative and the represented evolved. The Rise of the Representative corrects that omission by tracing the development of representative assemblies in colonial America and revealing they were a practical response to governing problems, rather than an imported model or an attempt to translate abstract philosophy into a concrete reality. Peverill Squire shows there were initially competing notions of representation, but over time the pull of the political system moved lawmakers toward behaving as delegates, even in places where they were originally intended to operate as trustees. By looking at the rules governing who could vote and who could serve, how representatives were apportioned within each colony, how candidates and voters behaved in elections, how expectations regarding their relationship evolved, and how lawmakers actually behaved, Squire demonstrates that the American political system that emerged following independence was strongly rooted in colonial-era developments.
 
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Scandalous Politics
Child Welfare Policy in the States
Juliet F. Gainsborough
Georgetown University Press, 2010

Little work has been done to systematically analyze how high-profile incidents of child neglect and abuse shape child welfare policymaking in the United States. In Scandalous Politics, Juliet Gainsborough presents quantitative analysis of all fifty states and qualitative case studies of three states (Florida, Colorado, and New Jersey) that reveal how well-publicized child welfare scandals result in adoption of new legislation and new administrative procedures.

Gainsborough’s quantitative analysis suggests that child welfare policymaking is frequently reactive, while the case studies provide more detail about variations and the legislative process. For example, the case studies illustrate how the nature and extent of the policy response varies according to particular characteristics of the political environment in the state and the administrative structure of the child welfare system.

Scandalous Politics increases our understanding of the politics of child welfare at both the state and federal level and provides new insights into existing theories of agenda-setting and the policy process. It will be of interest to everyone involved with child welfare policymaking and especially public policy and public administration scholars.

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The Shadowlands of Conduct
Ethics and State Politics
Beth A. Rosenson
Georgetown University Press, 2005

Although the linking of "ethics" and "politics" may seem more like the ingredients for a comedian's monologue, it is a sober issue and one that affects every American—especially when it comes to state politics, where the cynical might say ethics can never survive. To find examples of the latest corruption du jour, all one has to do is turn to the newspaper, or switch on the local newscast (think Illinois and New Jersey).

Scandals have been ubiquitous since the beginning of the Republic, but it wasn't until 1954 that ethical self-regulation began to move legislatively beyond bribery statutes to address deeper issues—those which, in New York Governor Thomas Dewey's words, skulked in the "shadowlands of conduct." Rosenson begins her exploration with that moment when New York became the first state to enact a general ethics law, setting standards and guidelines for behavior. Unforgiving and illuminating, she examines the many laws that have been enacted since and the reasons that many of these law came into being.

It is crucial to the functioning of a democratic government to understand how and why ethics laws vary across legislatures, and it is surprising to discover that many states have become far more stringent than the U.S. Congress in laws and regulations. Using both qualitative historical sources and rigorous statistical analysis, Rosenson examines when and why, from 1954 to the present, legislators have enacted ethics laws that seem to threaten their own well-being. Among the economic, political, and institutional factors considered that have helped or hindered the passage of these laws, the most consistent was pure scandal, abetted by the media. To have good government, one must be able to trust it, and this book can help all citizens understand and find their way out of the shadowlands into the light.

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State Constitutional Politics
Governing by Amendment in the American States
John Dinan
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Since the US Constitution came into force in 1789, it has been amended just twenty-seven times, with ten of those amendments coming in the first two years following ratification. By contrast, state constitutions have been completely rewritten on a regular basis, and the current documents have been amended on average 150 times. This is because federal amendments are difficult, so politicians rarely focus on enacting them. Rather, they work to secure favorable congressional statutes or Supreme Court decisions. By contrast, the relative ease of state amendment processes makes them a realistic and regular vehicle for seeking change.

With State Constitutional Politics, John Dinan looks at the various occasions in American history when state constitutional amendments have served as instruments of governance. Among other things, amendments have constrained state officials in the way they levy taxes and spend money; enacted policies unattainable through legislation on issues ranging from minimum wage to the regulation of marijuana; and updated understandings of rights, including religious liberty, equal protection, and the right to bear arms. In addition to comprehensively chronicling the ways amendments shape politics in the states, Dinan also assesses the consequences of undertaking changes in governance through amendments rather than legislation or litigation. For various reasons, including the greater stability and legitimacy of changes achieved through the amendment process, he argues that it might be a more desirable way of achieving change.
 
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The State Roots of National Politics
Congress and the Tax Agenda, 1978–1986
Michael B. Berkman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994

Winner of the William Anderson Award of the American Political Science Association
Explores the role of state politics in shaping the national agenda during the 1980s. By focusing on the federal tax policy from 1978-1986, Berkman argues that a conservative political agenda slowly replaced the liberal agenda dominant since World War II.


The state roots model asserts that national policymakers, particularly members of Congress, are products of their state political systems and environments. Berkman applies this model to the tax-cutting policies that took hold nationally in 1978, before Regan came to office, and continued in the tax acts of 1981 and 1986.

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State Taxation Policy and Economic Growth
Michael Barker, ed.
Duke University Press, 1983
This volume discusses the problems of state governments in coping with contemporary issues of redesigning taxation policies to encourage economic growth.
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States And Labor Markets
edited by John Myles and Jill Quadagno
Temple University Press, 1991

During the last decade worries about population aging, increases in national expenditures for the elderly, and the trend toward early retirement have aroused new concerns about the future of old-age security. Myles and Quadagno have assembled a collection of original essays that examine how different countries have responded to these issues.

The essays in Part I explore the recent politics of old age in Great Britain, Canada, Poland, Scandinavia, West Germany, France, the Netherlands, Japan, and Australia. They demonstrate that while, during the Reagan and Thatcher era, the United States and Great Britain forged debates about old-age policies around a neo-conservative agenda, other countries facing similar matters followed different paths. In Part II, the authors examine how transformations in labor- market practices are gradually altering the status of older workers and with it our conventional understanding of old age.

The reconstruction of the international division of labor, the shift of employment from goods to services, and the adoption of new, knowledge-intensive technologies are changing the economic and political basis of the organization of old age. As we move toward the next century, these essays provide a starting point for a new generation of studies in the political economy of aging.

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States And Strangers
Refugees And Displacements Of Statecraft
Nevzat Soguk
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

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States of Belonging
German-American Intellectuals and the First World War
Phyllis Keller
Harvard University Press, 1979

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States of Belonging
Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion
Tomas R. Jimenez
Russell Sage Foundation, 2021
Political turmoil surrounding immigration at the federal level and the inability of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform have provided an opening for state and local governments to become more active in setting their own immigration-related policies. States largely dictate the resources, institutions, and opportunities immigrants can access: who can get a driver’s license or attend a state university, what languages are spoken in schools and public offices, how law enforcement interacts with the public, and even what schools teach students about history. In States of Belonging, an interdisciplinary team of immigration experts – Tomás R. Jiménez, Deborah J. Schildkraut, Yuen J. Huo, and John F.  Dovidio – explore the interconnections among immigration policies, attitudes about immigrants and immigration, and sense of belonging in two neighboring states – Arizona and New Mexico – with divergent approaches to welcoming newcomers.
 
Arizona and New Mexico are historically and demographically similar, but they differ in their immigration policies. Arizona has enacted unwelcoming policies towards immigrants, restricting the access of immigrants to state resources, social services, and public institutions. New Mexico is more welcoming, actively seeking to protect the rights of immigrants and extending access to state resources and institutions. The authors draw on an original survey and in-depth interviews of a cross-section of each state’s population to illustrate how these differing approaches affect the sense of belonging not only among immigrants, but among the U.S.-born as well.
 
Respondents in Arizona, regardless of whether they were foreign- or native-born or their ethno-racial background, agreed that the state is unwelcoming to immigrants, and they pointed to Arizona’s restrictive policies as the primary factor. The sense of rejection perceived by Latinos in Arizona, including the foreign-born and the U.S.-born, was profound. They felt the effects of administrative and symbolic exclusions of the state’s unwelcoming policies as they went about their daily lives.
 
New Mexico’s more welcoming approach had positive effects on the Latino immigrant population, and these policies contributed to an increased sense of belonging among U.S.-born Latinos and U.S.-born whites as well. The authors show that exposure to information about welcoming policies is associated with an improved sense of belonging across most population groups. They also find that the primary dividing line when it came to reactions to welcoming policies was political, not ethno-racial. Only self-identified Republicans, Latino as well as white, showed reduced feelings of belonging. 
 
States of Belonging demonstrates that welcoming policies cultivate a greater sense of belonging for immigrants and other state citizens, suggesting that policies aimed at helping immigrants gain a social, economic, and political foothold in this country can pay a broad societal dividend.
 

 
 
 
 
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States of Desire Revisited
Travels in Gay America
Edmund White
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
States of Desire Revisited looks back from the twenty-first century at a pivotal moment in the late 1970s: Gay Liberation was a new and flourishing movement of creative culture, political activism, and sexual freedom, just before the 1980s devastation of AIDS. Edmund White traveled America, recording impressions of gay individuals and communities that remain perceptive and captivating today. He noted politicos in D.C. working the system, in-fighting radicals in New York and San Francisco, butch guys in Houston and self-loathing but courteous gentlemen in Memphis, the "Fifties in Deep Freeze" in Kansas City, progressive thinkers with conservative style in Minneapolis and Portland, wealth and beauty in Los Angeles, and, in Santa Fe, a desert retreat for older gays and lesbians since the 1920s.
            White frames those past travels with a brief, bracing review of gay America since the 1970s ("now we were all supposed to settle down with a partner in the suburbs and adopt a Korean daughter"), and a reflection on how Internet culture has diminished unique gay places and scenes but brought isolated individuals into a global GLBTQ community.
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States Of Exception
Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity
Keya Ganguly
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

Explores the conflict between capitalism and tradition in an immigrant community

A philosophical anthropology of everyday experience, this book is also a deeply informed and thought-provoking reflection on the work of cultural critique. States of Exception looks into a community of immigrants from India living in southern New Jersey—a group to whom the author, as a daughter of two of its members, enjoyed unprecedented access.

Her position allows Keya Ganguly to approach the culture of a middle-class group (albeit one that is marginalized by racial prejudice), while the group’s relatively comfortable and protected style of life offers unusual insight into the concept of the everyday and the sense in which a seemingly commonplace existence can be understood as in crisis: a state of exception. Thus, Ganguly draws on the work of the Frankfurt School, particularly Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, to explore the possibilities of a dialectical critique of the everyday—a state of exception informing ordinary yet crisis-ridden narratives of the self under late capitalism.

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States of Exception in American History
Edited by Gary Gerstle and Joel Isaac
University of Chicago Press, 2020
States of Exception in American History brings to light the remarkable number of instances since the Founding in which the protections of the Constitution have been overridden, held in abeyance, or deliberately weakened for certain members of the polity. In the United States, derogations from the rule of law seem to have been a feature of—not a bug in—the constitutional system.

The first comprehensive account of the politics of exceptions and emergencies in the history of the United States, this book weaves together historical studies of moments and spaces of exception with conceptual analyses of emergency, the state of exception, sovereignty, and dictatorship. The Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Cold War figure prominently in the essays; so do Francis Lieber, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, Clinton Rossiter, and others who explored whether it was possible for the United States to survive states of emergency without losing its democratic way. States of Exception combines political theory and the history of political thought with histories of race and political institutions. It is both inspired by and illuminating of the American experience with constitutional rule in the age of terror and Trump.
 
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States of Grace
Senegalese in Italy and the New European Immigration
Donald Martin Carter
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

States of Grace was first published in 1997. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Leaving their depleted fields for better prospects, Senegalese immigrants have made their way to Italy in significant numbers. What this migration means, in the context of both the migratory traditions and conditions of Africa and the history and future of the European nation-state, is the subject of this timely and ambitious book.

Focusing on Turin, the northern Italian point of entry for so many Senegalese, States of Grace chronicles the arrival and formation of a transnational African Islamic community in a largely Catholic Western European country, one that did not have immigrant legislation until 1991. With no colonial relation to Italy, the Senegalese represent the vanguard of population movements expanding outside of the arch of former colonial powers.

Donald Martin Carter locates the Senegalese migration in the context of past African internal and international migration and of present crises in West African agriculture. He also shows how the Senegalese migration, constituting a "phenomenon" and catalyzing new immigration restrictions among European states, calls into question the European interstate system, the future of the nation-state, and the nature of its relationship with non-European states.

Throughout Europe, protectionist immigration policies are often crafted in chauvinist and racist tones in which "migrants" is a euphemism for blacks, Arabs, and Asians. States of Grace uses Senegalese migration to demonstrate that racial conceptions are crucial to understanding the classifications of non-national "outside" and internal "other." The book is a bracing encounter with the ever-increasing cultural and ethnic heterogeneity that is the new and pressing reality of European society.

Donald Martin Carter is visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

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States of Imagination
Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds.
Duke University Press, 2001
The state has recently been rediscovered as an object of inquiry by a broad range of scholars. Reflecting the new vitality of the field of political anthropology, States of Imagination draws together the best of this recent critical thinking to explore the postcolonial state. Contributors focus on a variety of locations from Guatemala, Pakistan, and Peru to India and Ecuador; they study what the state looks like to those seeing it from the vantage points of rural schools, police departments, small villages, and the inside of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Focusing on the micropolitics of everyday state-making, the contributors examine the mythologies, paradoxes, and inconsistencies of the state through ethnographies of diverse postcolonial practices. They show how the authority of the state is constantly challenged from the local as well as the global and how growing demands to confer rights and recognition to ever more citizens, organizations, and institutions reveal a persistent myth of the state as a source of social order and an embodiment of popular sovereignty. Demonstrating the indispensable value of ethnographic work on the practices and the symbols of the state, States of Imagination showcases a range of studies and methods to provide insight into the diverse forms of the postcolonial state as an arena of both political and cultural struggle.
This collection will interest students and scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and history.

Contributors. Lars Buur, Mitchell Dean, Akhil Gupta, Thomas Blom Hansen, Steffen Jensen, Aletta J. Norval, David Nugent, Sarah Radcliffe, Rachel Sieder, Finn Stepputat, Martijn van Beek, Oskar Verkaaik, Fiona Wilson

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States of Incarceration
Rebellion, Reform, and America’s Punishment System
Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti
Reaktion Books, 2022
A crucial book for our current moment, uncovering the history of mass incarceration in the United States and engaging with the major challenges of contemporary prison and police abolition activism.
 
Inspired by the George Floyd Rebellion, States of Incarceration examines the ongoing reconfiguration of mass incarceration as crucial for understanding how race, class, and punishment shape America today. The rise of mass incarceration has coincided with massive disinvestment in working-class communities, particularly communities of color, and a commitment to criminalize poverty, addiction, and interpersonal violence. As Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti argue, the present is a moment of transition and potential reform of incarceration and, by extension, the American justice system. States of Incarceration provides insights into the rise of mass incarceration and its recent history while focusing on the needs of campaigners struggling with the issues of police and prison abolition, as well as the challenges that lie ahead. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with these questions.
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States of Marriage
Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali
Emily S. Burrill
Ohio University Press, 2015
States of Marriage shows how throughout the colonial period in French Sudan (present-day Mali) the institution of marriage played a central role in how the empire defined its colonial subjects as gendered persons with certain attendant rights and privileges. The book is a modern history of the ideological debates surrounding the meaning of marriage, as well as the associated legal and sociopolitical practices in colonial and postcolonial Mali. It is also the first to use declassified court records regarding colonialist attempts to classify and categorize traditional marriage conventions in the southern region of the country. In French Sudan, as elsewhere in colonial Africa, the first stage of marriage reform consisted of efforts to codify African marriages, bridewealth transfers, and divorce proceedings in public records, rendering these social arrangements “legible” to the colonial administration. Once this essential legibility was achieved, other, more forceful interventions to control and reframe marriage became possible. This second stage of marriage reform can be traced through transformations in and by the colonial court system, African engagements with state-making processes, and formations of “gender justice.” The latter refers to gender-based notions of justice and legal rights, typically as defined by governing and administrative bodies as well as by socioxadpolitical communities. Gender justice went through a period of favoring the rights of women, to a period of favoring patriarchs, to a period of emphasizing the power of the individual—but all within the context of a paternalistic and restrictive colonial state.
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States of Memory
Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection
Jeffrey K. Olick, ed.
Duke University Press, 2003
States of Memory illuminates the construction of national memory from a comparative perspective. The essays collected here emphasize that memory itself has a history: not only do particular meanings change, but the very faculty of memory—its place in social relations and the forms it takes—varies over time. Integrating theories of memory and nationalism with case studies, these essays stake a vital middle ground between particular and universal approaches to social memory studies.

The contributors—including historians and social scientists—describe societies’ struggles to produce and then use ideas of what a “normal” past should look like. They examine claims about the genuineness of revolution (in fascist Italy and communist Russia), of inclusiveness (in the United States and Australia), of innocence (in Germany), and of inevitability (in Israel). Essayists explore the reputation of Confucius among Maoist leaders during China’s Cultural Revolution; commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States Congress; the “end” of the postwar era in Japan; and how national calendars—in signifying what to remember, celebrate, and mourn—structure national identification. Above all, these essays reveal that memory is never unitary, no matter how hard various powers strive to make it so.

States of Memory will appeal to those scholars-in sociology, history, political science, cultural studies, anthropology, and art history-who are interested in collective memory, commemoration, nationalism, and state formation.

Contributors. Paloma Aguilar, Frederick C. Corney, Carol Gluck, Matt K. Matsuda, Jeffrey K. Olick, Francesca Polletta, Uri Ram, Barry Schwartz, Lyn Spillman, Charles Tilly, Simonetta Falasca Zamponi, Eviatar Zerubavel, Tong Zhang

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States of Nature
Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940
By Stuart George McCook
University of Texas Press, 2002

The process of nation-building in Latin America transformed the relations between the state, the economy, and nature. Between 1760 and 1940, the economies of most countries in the Spanish Caribbean came to depend heavily on the export of plant products, such as coffee, tobacco, and sugar. After the mid-nineteenth century, this model of export-led economic growth also became a central tenet of liberal projects of nation-building. As international competition grew and commodity prices fell over this period, Latin American growers strove to remain competitive by increasing agricultural production. By the turn of the twentieth century, their pursuit of export-led growth had generated severe environmental problems, including soil exhaustion, erosion, and epidemic outbreaks of crop diseases and pests.

This book traces the history of the intersections between nature, economy, and nation in the Spanish Caribbean through a history of the agricultural and botanical sciences. Growers and governments in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, and Costa Rica turned to scientists to help them establish practical and ideological control over nature. They hoped to use science to alleviate the pressing environmental and economic stresses, without having to give up their commitment to export-led growth. Starting from an overview of the relationship among science, nature, and development throughout the export boom of 1760 to 1930, Stuart McCook examines such topics as the relationship between scientific plant surveys and nation-building, the development of a "creole science" to address the problems of tropical agriculture, the ecological rationalization of the sugar industry, and the growth of technocratic ideologies of science and progress. He concludes with a look at how the Great Depression of the 1930s changed the paradigms of economic and political development and the role of science and nature in these paradigms.

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States of Plague
Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic
Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris
University of Chicago Press, 2022
States of Plague examines Albert Camus’s novel as a palimpsest of  pandemic life, an uncannily relevant account of the psychology and politics of a public health crisis.

As one of the most discussed books of the COVID-19 crisis, Albert Camus’s classic novel The Plague has become a new kind of literary touchstone. Surrounded by terror and uncertainty, often separated from loved ones or unable to travel, readers sought answers within the pages of Camus’s 1947 tale about an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic. Many found in it a story about their own lives—a book to shed light on a global health crisis.

In thirteen linked chapters told in alternating voices, Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris hold the past and present of The Plague in conversation, discovering how the novel has reached people in their current moment.  Kaplan’s chapters explore the book’s tangled and vivid history, while Marris’s are drawn to the ecology of landscape and language. Through these pages, they find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Along the way, Kaplan and Marris examine how the novel’s original allegory might resonate with a new generation of readers who have experienced a global pandemic.  They describe how they learned to contemplate the skies of a plague spring, to examine the body politic and the politics of immunity.

Both personal and eloquently written, States of Plague uncovers for us the mysterious way a novel can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on other possible futures.
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States of Terror
History, Theory, Literature
David Simpson
University of Chicago Press, 2019
How have we come to depend so greatly on the words terror and terrorism to describe broad categories of violence? David Simpson offers here a philology of terror, tracking the concept’s long, complicated history across literature, philosophy, political science, and theology—from Plato to NATO.

Introducing the concept of the “fear-terror cluster,” Simpson is able to capture the wide range of terms that we have used to express extreme emotional states over the centuries—from anxiety, awe, and concern to dread, fear, and horror. He shows that the choices we make among such words to describe shades of feeling have seriously shaped the attribution of motives, causes, and effects of the word “terror” today, particularly when violence is deployed by or against the state. At a time when terror-talk is widely and damagingly exploited by politicians and the media, this book unpacks the slippery rhetoric of terror and will prove a vital resource across humanistic and social sciences disciplines.
 
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States of Violence
Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2005
This extraordinary collection of essays recasts prevailing understandings of the role of violence in the formation of the modern world. By illuminating the links between exceptional ruptures and the routine maintenance of social order, the collection expands and redefines our understanding of political violence.

By means of a combination of detailed historical studies and imaginative reflection, this book explores the often unrecognized violent foundations of modern nations. Focusing on the relations between the state and the domestic order, it directs attention to contests over the establishment and representation of meanings and addresses the impact of state-centered categories and narratives on the organization and collective remembering of violence. The essays cover a wide range of regions, time periods, and processes, including the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, the United States, and Europe, and span violent uprisings as well as the quotidian administration of the law. As its title suggests, States of Violence brings together the stable and the transient, the institutional and the experiential, the state sanctioned and the insurgent, inviting recognition of the multiple intersections of practices of governance and processes of feeling.

"Few scholars have managed as effectively as these to denature the place of violence in modern social life and thought. They make it abundantly plain that the frank brutality, often associated with colonial contexts, is inseparable from less acknowledged forms of "peaceful violence" that pervade much of our contemporary political life."
-Jean Comaroff, Bernard E. and Ellen C. Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago

Fernando Coronil, a Venezuelan citizen, is Associate Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. His research focuses on contemporary historical transformations in Latin America and on theoretical issues concerning the state, modernity, and postcolonialism. His numerous publications include The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela; "Beyond Occidentalism: Towards Non-Imperial Geohistorical Categories"; and the introductory essay in Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, by Fernando Ortiz. He is completing a book on the coup against President Chávez of Venezuela.

Julie Skurski teaches in the Departments of Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan and is the Associate Director of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History. Her research concerns the intersections of national, racial, and gender relations in Latin America, with a focus on popular religiosity. Her publications include "The Ambiguities of Authenticity in Latin America: Doña Bárbara and the Construction of National Identity," in Becoming National, G. Eley and R. Suny, eds. She is currently completing Civilizing Barbarism, a book on gender, mestizaje, and the state in Venezuela.
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Statewide Wetlands Strategies
World Wildlife Fund
Island Press, 1992

Statewide Wetlands Strategies offers comprehensive strategies that draw upon all levels of government and the private sector to focus and coordinate efforts to work toward the goal of no-net-loss of wetlands.

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Studies in State and Local Public Finance
Edited by Harvey S. Rosen
University of Chicago Press, 1986
In fiscal year 1981-82, state and local government spending actually exceeded federal nondefense spending. However, past research in public finance has focused on federal spending and policies and paid little attention to the economic problems of state and local governments. Studies in State and Local Public Finance goes far in correcting this omission.

Developed from a National Bureau of Economic Research conference on state and local financing, the volume includes papers summarizing and extending recent research as well as commentaries. Covering a wide range of topics, the papers share an empirical orientation and a concern with policy issues. The first two papers look at the role of tax-exempt bonds in local public finance. Their findings suggest that tax policies significantly affect municipal borrowing practices and that financial advantage can be achieved under certain of these practices. Other papers address specific issues related to state and local tax policy: the impact of local taxes on location decisions; efficient road-use charges for trucks; and the relation of income and general sales tax systems over time. Examining issues related to United States federalism, the last paper focuses on the impact of federal grant aid to states.

The research and findings these papers report make an important contribution to the study of local public finance and should be of particular interest to policymakers and those involved in private and public financing at the local, state, or federal level.
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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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Theorizing NGOs
States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism
Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Theorizing NGOs examines how the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has transformed the conditions of women's lives and of feminist organizing. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal suggest that we can understand the proliferation of NGOs through a focus on the NGO as a unified form despite the enormous variation and diversity contained within that form. Theorizing NGOs brings together cutting-edge feminist research on NGOs from various perspectives and disciplines. Contributors locate NGOs within local and transnational configurations of power, interrogate the relationships of nongovernmental organizations to states and to privatization, and map the complex, ambiguous, and ultimately unstable synergies between feminisms and NGOs. While some of the contributors draw on personal experience with NGOs, others employ regional or national perspectives. Spanning a broad range of issues with which NGOs are engaged, from microcredit and domestic violence to democratization, this groundbreaking collection shows that NGOs are, themselves, fields of gendered struggles over power, resources, and status.

Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Victoria Bernal, LeeRay M. Costa, Inderpal Grewal, Laura Grünberg, Elissa Helms, Julie Hemment, Saida Hodžic, Lamia Karim, Sabine Lang, Lauren Leve, Kathleen O'Reilly, Aradhana Sharma
 
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Trading Blocs
States, Firms, and Regions in the World Economy
Kerry A. Chase
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Global commerce is rapidly organizing around regional trading blocs in North America, Western Europe, Pacific Asia, and elsewhere--with potentially dangerous consequences for the world trading system. Professor Kerry Chase examines how domestic politics has driven the emergence of these trading blocs, arguing that businesses today are more favorably inclined to global trade liberalization than in the past because recent regional trading arrangements have created opportunities to restructure manufacturing more efficiently.

Trading Blocs is the first book to systematically demonstrate the theoretical significance of economies of scale in domestic pressure for trading blocs, and thereby build on a growing research agenda in areas of political economy and domestic politics.

"Chase has written a superb book that provides us with an innovative and compelling explanation for the development of trading blocs."
--Vinod Aggarwal, Director, Berkeley APEC Study Center, University of California, Berkeley

Kerry A. Chase is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University.
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Traffic Safety Reform in the United States and Great Britain
Jerome S. Legge
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991

Recently, there has been a renewed concern with highway safety, reflected in wide media coverage and new laws aimed at reducing highway deaths and injuries. Legge examines three initiatives that have been studied only in isolation: stricter drinking-age laws, mandated use of seat belts, and deterrents to drunk driving. His research covers three large industrial states-New York, California, and Michigan, as well as Great Britain, each of which uses a different mix of these initiatives. Using a combination of theory and research methodology, Legge tests a number of models on how traffic fatalities might be reduced and offers valuable suggestions for policy makers, researchers, and activists.

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Volatile States
Institutions, Policy, and the Performance of American State Economies
W. Mark Crain
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Why do American state economies grow at such vastly different rates and manifest such wide differences in living standards? Volatile States identifies the sources of rising living standards by examining the recent economic and fiscal history of the American states. With new insights about the factors that contribute to state economic success, the book departs from traditional analyses of economic performance in its emphasis on the role of volatility.
Volatile States identifies institutions and policies that are key determinants of economic success and illustrates the considerable promise of a mean-variance criterion for assessing state economic performance. The mean-variance perspective amends applications of growth models that rely on the mobility of productive factors keyed to income levels alone. Simply measuring the level of growth in state economies reveals an incomplete and perhaps distorted picture of performance. Taking the volatility of state economies explicitly into account refines the whole notion of "economic success."
This book is essential reading for economists, political scientists, and policy-makers who routinely confront questions about the consequences of alternative institutional arrangements and economic policy choices.
W. Mark Crain is Professor of Economics and Research Associate, James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy, George Mason University.
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Waste is a Terrible Thing to Mind
Risk, Radiation, and Distrust of Government
Weingart, John
Rutgers University Press, 2007

It is an unenviable task, but one that all state governments face: finding a final “resting place” for low-level nuclear waste from power plants, hospitals, university laboratories, and other industries. John Weingart was the official in New Jersey who for many years led this onerous charge. This book is the story of how he and a commission appointed by the governor, instead of imposing a top-down solution, designed an approach that would confront public fears by seeking a community that would volunteer to host a disposal facility. Initially, this novel approach was surprisingly successful, as leaders in a dozen municipalities stepped forward to say they might be interested. Once their interest became known, however, the process in each town derailed. Residents demanded assurances of zero-percent risk and expressed profound distrust of government assertions and promises.

Waste Is a Terrible Thing to Mind is a compelling, suspenseful, and amusing insider’s account of New Jersey policy and politics, but it is also a larger saga of the challenges facing society in the post–9/11 era when the public’s distrust of government is increasing at the same time that its sensitivity to health and safety threats is heightened.

For more information, see:
http://wasteisaterriblethingtomind.com/

"Written with a wry sense of humor, it is a pleasure to read and could provide the blueprint for future efforts to find locations for controversial land uses."
- Marie Curtis, Executive Director, New Jersey Environmental Lobby

"A penetrating look at one state's struggle with radioactive waste ... offering some tantalizing reflections on the public understanding of science and how we, in a democratic society, deal with complexity and uncertainty."
- Jay Kaufman, State Senator, Massachusetts State Legislature

"A provocative story, laced with humor, demonstrates how public distrust of government can make it impotent. It should be read by anyone working on public policy issues, especially planning, growth, and the environment."
- Harriet Keyserling, Former Energy Committee Chair, South Carolina State Legislature

"Readers interested in environmental policy, land use and how governments make decisions will learn much from this fine reflective insider's account. It's also a primer on how to survive and thrive in state government."
- David N. Kinsey, Visiting Professor, Woodrow Wilson School Princeton University

"... a fascinating case study of how a government agency creatively tried to solve an intractable public issue. Although the agency failed in its quest to recruit a town to host a low-level radioactive waste site, Weingart's detailed and often humorous narrative of the agency's efforts is a clear winner."
- Jack Sabatino, Judge, New Jersey Superior Court

"... a very engaging and sometimes discouraging case study about the pitfalls and perils of trying to site a controversial facility the right way."
- Gregg Larson, Administrator, Center for Biometric Research, University of Minnesota

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Welfare Policymaking in the States
The Devil in Devolution
Pamela Winston
Georgetown University Press, 2002

Now that responsibility for welfare policy has devolved from Washington to the states, Pamela Winston examines how the welfare policymaking process has changed. Under the welfare reform act of 1996, welfare was the first and most basic safety net program to be sent back to state control. Will the shift help or further diminish programs for low-income people, especially the millions of children who comprise the majority of the poor in the United States?

In this book, Winston probes the nature of state welfare politics under devolution and contrasts it with welfare politics on the national level. Starting with James Madison's argument that the range of perspectives and interests found in state policymaking will be considerably narrower than in Washington, she analyzes the influence of interest groups and other key actors in the legislative process at both the state and national levels. She compares the legislative process during the 104th Congress (1995-96) with that in three states — Maryland, Texas, and North Dakota — and finds that the debates in the states saw a more limited range of participants, with fewer of them representing poor people, and fewer competing ideas.

The welfare reform bill of 1996 comes up for renewal in 2002. At stake in the U.S. experiment in welfare reform are principles of equal opportunity, fairness, and self-determination as well as long-term concerns for political and social stability. This investigation of the implications of the changing pattern of welfare politics will interest scholars and teachers of social policy, federalism, state politics, and public policy generally, and general readers interested in social policy, state politics, social justice, and American politics.

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Where Women Run
Gender and Party in the American States
Kira Sanbonmatsu
University of Michigan Press, 2010
Why don’t more women run for office? Why are certain states more likely to have female candidates and representatives? Would strengthening political parties narrow the national gender gap? Where Women Run addresses these important questions through a rare and incisive look at how candidates are recruited. Drawing on surveys and case studies of party leaders and legislators in six states, political scientist Kira Sanbonmatsu analyzes the links between parties and representation, exposing the mechanism by which parties’ informal recruitment practices shape who runs—or doesn’t run—for political office in America.

“Kira Sanbonmatsu has done a masterful job of linking the representation of women in elective office to the activities of party organizations in the states. She combines qualitative and quantitative data to show how women are navigating the campaign process to become elected leaders and the changing role of party organizations in their recruitment and election. It is a significant contribution to the study of representative democracy.”
--Barbara Burrell, Northern Illinois University

“Sanbonmatsu has produced an excellent study that will invigorate research on the role of political parties and the recruitment of women candidates. Using a variety of methods and data sources, she has crafted a tightly constructed, clearly argued, and exceedingly well-written study. A commendable and convincing job.”
--Gary Moncrief, Boise State University

“Sanbonmatsu offers important insights in two neglected areas of American politics: the role of political parties in recruiting candidates and the continued under-representation of women in elected office. Connecting the two subjects through careful qualitative and statistical methods, insightful interpretation of the literature and interesting findings, the book is a significant new addition to scholarship on parties, gender, and political recruitment.”
--Linda Fowler, Dartmouth College

Kira Sanbonmatsu is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and Senior Scholar at the Eagleton Institute of Politics’ Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP). She was previously associate professor at Ohio State University. She is the author of Democrats, Republicans, and the Politics of Women’s Place.
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Wisconsin and the Shaping of American Law
Joseph A. Ranney
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
State laws affect nearly every aspect of our daily lives—our safety, personal relationships, and business dealings—but receive less scholarly attention than federal laws and courts. Joseph A. Ranney looks at how state laws have evolved and shaped American history, through the lens of the historically influential state of Wisconsin.

Organized around periods of social need and turmoil, the book considers the role of states as legal laboratories in establishing American authority west of the Appalachians, in both implementing and limiting Jacksonian reforms and in navigating legal crises before and during the Civil War—including Wisconsin's invocation of sovereignty to defy federal fugitive slave laws. Ranney also surveys judicial revolts, the reforms of the Progressive era, and legislative responses to struggles for civil rights by immigrants, women, Native Americans, and minorities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the 1960s, battles have been fought at the state level over such issues as school vouchers, voting, and abortion rights.

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Wrecked
Deinstitutionalization and Partial Defenses in State Higher Education Policy
Barrett J. Taylor
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Higher education is a central institution in U.S. democracy. In the 2010s, however, many states that spent previous decades building up their higher education systems began to tear them down. Growing hostility toward higher education reflected changing social forces that remade the politics of U.S. higher education. The political Right became increasingly reliant on angry white voters as higher education became more racially diverse. The Republican party became more closely connected to extremely wealthy donors as higher education became more costly. In Wrecked, Barrett J. Taylor shows how these social changes set a collision course for the Right and higher education. These attacks fed a policy agenda of deinstitutionalization, which encompassed stark divestment from higher education but was primarily characterized by an attack on the institution’s social foundation of public trust. In response to these attacks, higher education officials have offered a series of partial defenses that helped higher education to cope in the short-term but did nothing to defend the institution itself against the long-term threat of declining public trust. The failure to address underlying issues of mistrust allowed conflict to escalate to the point at which many states are now wrecking their public higher education systems. Wrecked offers a unique and compelling perspective linking higher education policymaking to broader social and political forces acting in the twenty-first century. 
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