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8812 books match the query 'Political Science' and 358 start with b

cover of Bribes, People, and Politics: How Everyday Corruption Shapes Governance in Eurasia

Bribes, People, and Politics

How Everyday Corruption Shapes Governance in Eurasia

William M. Reisinger & Marina Zaloznaya

University of Michigan Press, 2027

Everyday bureaucratic corruption is not the domain of oligarchs or powerful elites, but of informal exchanges between bureaucrats and ordinary citizens seeking to move paperwork, secure benefits, or avoid penalties. Despite extensive research on the economic, legal, and social consequences of corruption, this mundane form has rarely been treated as a political phenomenon.

Drawing on original, nationally representative surveys conducted in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and China, Bribes, People, and Politics analyzes how citizens’ encounters with corrupt bureaucratic practices influence popular political trust, perceptions of elite corruption, legal attitudes, voting behavior, and political activism. After each interaction with public bureaucracy, citizens subtly revise their views about what role people like themselves play within the political system. As a result, corrupt bureaucratic encounters can significantly shape popular attitudes and behavior toward the political order. By linking the microdynamics of bureaucratic encounters to macro-level questions of political legitimacy and regime durability, this book bridges the literature on corruption, political sociology, and comparative politics, offering a new framework for understanding the persistent phenomenon of public sector corruption in Eurasia.

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cover of Bridging State and Civil Society: Informal Organizations in Tajik/Afghan Badakhshan

Bridging State and Civil Society

Informal Organizations in Tajik/Afghan Badakhshan

Suzanne Levi-Sanchez

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Bridging State and Civil Society provides an in-depth study of parts of Central Asia and Afghanistan that remain marginalized from the larger region. As such, the people have developed distinct ways of governing and surviving, sometimes in spite of the state and in part because of informal organizations. Suzanne Levi-Sanchez provides eight case studies, each an independent look at a particular informal organization, but each also part of a larger picture that helps the reader understand the importance and key role that informal organizations play for civil society and the state. Each case explores how informal organizations operate and investigates their structures and interactions with official state institutions, civil society, familial networks, and development organizations. As such, each chapter explores the concepts through a different lens while asking a deceptively simple question: What is the relationship between informal organizations and the state?

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cover of Bridging a Great Divide: The Battle for the Columbia River Gorge

Bridging a Great Divide

The Battle for the Columbia River Gorge

Kathie Durbin

Oregon State University Press, 2013

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act, setting into motion one of the great land-use experiments of modern times. The act struck a compromise between protection for one of the West’s most stunning landscapes—the majestic Gorge carved by Ice Age floods, which today divides Washington and Oregon—and encouragement of compatible economic development in communities on both sides of the river.

In Bridging a Great Divide, award-winning environmental journalist Kathie Durbin draws on interviews, correspondence, and extensive research to tell the story of the major shifts in the Gorge since the Act’s passage. Sweeping change has altered the Gorge’s landscape: upscale tourism and outdoor recreation, gentrification, the end of logging in national forests, the closing of aluminum plants, wind farms, and a population explosion in the metropolitan area to its west. Yet, to the casual observer, the Gorge looks much the same as it did twenty-five years ago.

How can we measure the success of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act? In this insightful and revealing history, Durbin suggests that the answer depends on who you are: a small business owner, an environmental watchdog group, a chamber of commerce. The story of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area is the story of the Pacific Northwest in microcosm, as the region shifts from a natural-resource-based economy to one based on recreation, technology, and quality of life.
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cover of Bridging the Divide: My Life

Bridging the Divide

My Life

Edward W. Brooke

Rutgers University Press, 2006

President Lyndon Johnson never understood it. Neither did President Richard Nixon. How could a black man, a Republican no less, be elected to the United States Senate from liberal, Democratic Massachusetts-a state with an African American population of only 2 percent?

The mystery of Senator Edward Brooke's meteoric rise from Boston lawyer to Massachusetts attorney general to the first popularly elected African American U.S. senator with some of the highest favorable ratings of any Massachusetts politician confounded many of the best political minds of the day. After winning a name for himself as the first black man to be elected a state's attorney general, as a crime fighter, and as the organizer of the Boston Strangler Task Force, this articulate and charismatic man burst on the national scene in 1966 when he ran for the Senate.

In two terms in the Senate during some of the most racially tormented years of the twentieth century, Brooke, through tact, personality, charm, and determination, became a highly regarded member of "the most exclusive club in the world." The only African American senator ever to be elected to a second term, Brooke established a reputation for independent thinking and challenged the powerbrokers and presidents of the day in defense of the poor and disenfranchised.

In this autobiography, Brooke details the challenges that confronted African American men of his generation and reveals his desire to be measured not as a black man in a white society but as an individual in a multiracial society. Chided by some in the white community as being "too black to be white" and in the black community as "too white to be black," Brooke sought only to represent the people of Massachusetts and the national interest.

His story encompasses the turbulent post-World War II years, from the gains of the civil rights movement, through the riotous 1960s, to the dark days of Watergate, with stories of his relationships with the Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, and future senator Hillary Clinton. Brooke also speaks candidly of his personal struggles, including his bitter divorce from his first wife and, most recently, his fight against cancer.

A dramatic, compelling, and inspirational account, Brooke's life story demonstrates the triumph of the human spirit, offering lessons about politics, life, reconciliation, and love.

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cover of Bridging the Information Gap: Legislative Member Organizations as Social Networks in the United States and the European Union

Bridging the Information Gap

Legislative Member Organizations as Social Networks in the United States and the European Union

Nils Ringe and Jennifer Nicoll Victor with Christopher J. Carman

University of Michigan Press, 2013

Legislative member organizations (LMOs)—such as caucuses in the U.S. Congress and intergroups in the European Parliament—exist in lawmaking bodies around the world. Unlike parties and committees, LMOs play no obvious, predefined role in the legislative process. They provide legislators with opportunities to establish social networks with colleagues who share common interests. In turn, such networks offer valuable opportunities for the efficient exchange of policy-relevant—and sometimes otherwise unattainable—information between legislative offices. Building on classic insights from the study of social networks, the authors provide a comparative overview of LMOs across advanced, liberal democracies. In two nuanced case studies of LMOs in the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress, the authors rely on a mix of social network analysis, sophisticated statistical methods, and careful qualitative analysis of a large number of in-depth interviews.

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cover of Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government

Bring Back the Bureaucrats

Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government

John DiIulio

Templeton Press, 2014

In Bring Back the Bureaucrats, John J. DiIulio Jr., one of America’s most respected political scientists and an adviser to presidents in both parties, summons the facts and statistics to show us how America’s big government works and why reforms that include adding a million more people to the federal workforce by 2035 might help to slow government’s growth while improving its performance.

Starting from the underreported reality that the size of the federal workforce hasn’t increased since the early 1960s, even though the federal budget has skyrocketed. The number of federal programs has ballooned; Bring Back the Bureaucrats tells us what our elected leaders won’t: there are not enough federal workers to work for our democracy effectively.

DiIulio reveals that the government in America is Leviathan by Proxy, a grotesque form of debt-financed big government that guarantees terrible government. Washington relies on state and local governments, for-profit firms, and nonprofit organizations to implement federal policies and programs. Big-city mayors, defense industry contractors, nonprofit executives, and other national proxies lobby incessantly for more federal spending. This proxy system chokes on chores such as cleaning up toxic waste sites, caring for hospitalized veterans, collecting taxes, handling plutonium, and policing more than $100 billion annually in “improper payments.” The lack of competent, well-trained federal civil servants resulted in the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina and the troubled launch of Obamacare’s “health exchanges.”

Bring Back the Bureaucrats is further distinguished by the presence of E. J. Dionne Jr. and Charles Murray, two of the most astute voices from the political left and right, respectively, who offer their candid responses to DiIulio at the end of the book.

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cover of Bringing Representation Home: State Legislators among Their Constituencies

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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cover of Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age

Bringing the Empire Back Home

France in the Global Age

Herman Lebovics

Duke University Press, 2004

Thirty years ago, an international antiglobalization movement was born in the grazing lands of France’s Larzac plateau. In the 1970s, Larzac farmers were joined by others from around the world in their efforts to prevent the expansion of a local military base: by ecologists, religious pacifists, and urban leftists, and by social activists including American Indians and South American peasant leaders. In 1999 some of the same farmers who had fought the expansion of the base in the 1970s—including José Bové—dismantled the new local McDonald’s. That gesture was part of a protest against U.S. tariffs on specified French exports including Roquefort cheese, the region’s primary market product. The two struggles—the one against expanding a French army camp intended to train troops for postcolonial wars, the other against American economic might—were landmarks in the global campaign to preserve local cultures. They were also key episodes in the decades-long attempt by the French to define their cultural heritage within a much changed nation, a new Europe, and, especially, an American-dominated world.

In Bringing the Empire Back Home, the inventive cultural historian Herman Lebovics provides a riveting account of how intense disputes about what it means to be French have played out over the past half-century, redefining Paris, the regions, and the former colonies in relation to one another and the world at large. In a narrative populated with peasants, people from the former colonies, museum curators, former colonial administrators, left Christians, archaeologists, anthropologists, soccer players and their teenage fans, and, yes, leading government officials, Lebovics reveals contemporary French society and cultures as perhaps the West’s most important testing grounds of pluralism and assimilation. A lively cultural history, Bringing the Empire Back Home highlights not only the political significance of France’s efforts to synthesize the regional, national, European, ethnic postcolonial, and global but also the chaotic beauty of the endeavor.

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cover of Britain and World Power since 1945: Constructing a Nation's Role in International Politics

Britain and World Power since 1945

Constructing a Nation's Role in International Politics

David M. McCourt

University of Michigan Press, 2014

?Though Britain’s descent from global imperial power began in World War II and continued over the subsequent decades with decolonization, military withdrawal, and integration into the European Union, its foreign policy has remained that of a Great Power. David M. McCourt maintains that the lack of a fundamental reorientation of Britain’s foreign policy cannot be explained only by material or economic factors, or even by an essential British international “identity.” Rather, he argues, the persistence of Britain’s place in world affairs can best be explained by the prominent international role that Britain assumed and into which it was thrust by other nations, notably France and the United States, over these years.

Using a role-based theory of state action in international politics based on symbolic interactionism and the work of George Herbert Mead, Britain and World Power since 1945 puts forward a novel interpretation of Britain’s engagement in four key international episodes: the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Skybolt Crisis of 1962, Britain’s second application to the European Economic Council in 1966–67, and Britain’s reinvasion of the Falklands in 1982. McCourt concludes with a discussion of international affairs since the end of the Cold War and the implications for the future of British foreign policy.
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cover of Britain and the Greek Economic Crisis, 1944-1947: From Liberation to the Truman Doctrine

Britain and the Greek Economic Crisis, 1944-1947

From Liberation to the Truman Doctrine

Athanasios Lykogiannis

University of Missouri Press, 2002

Britainand the Greek Economic Crisis, 1944–1947 concentrates on Anglo-Greek interactions in economic matters during the political and economic turmoil between the Axis occupation of Greece and the Greek civil war. By analyzing the Greek crisis primarily in economic terms, Athanasios Lykogiannis avoids the political partisanship that has colored much previous writing on the subject and throws light on many issues neglected by earlier authors. Drawing on a range of untapped British, American, and Greek archival sources, as well as extensive secondary sources, the author examines the interplay of political and economic factors, such as the ingrained polarization of Greek society and the weakness and timidity of the country’s governments, that aggravated and prolonged the crisis.
Lykogiannis critically examines Greece’s policies, and the actors behind them, and assesses the British involvement in the episode: the quality of the measures recommended to the Greeks, the constraints facing British advisers in the country, and the reasons for the ultimate failure of British intervention. He also compares the two periods of western tutelage of Greece: the British and the American, from the announcement of the Truman Doctrine to the inauguration of the European Recovery Program.
Britain and the Greek Economic Crisis, 1944–1947 argues that even if the Germans were to blame for the conditions that led to hyperinflation, the mediocre results of successive attempts to stabilize the economy were caused by internal factors such as the fiscal ineptitude of the postwar Greek governments and their ignorance of, and hostility toward, any form of economic management. Whereas many have blamed foreign intervention for prolonging the crisis, Lykogiannis makes clear that the decisions of successive Greek governments were far more significant. His book demonstrates how firmly the crisis of post-liberation Greece was rooted in the country’s political, economic, and social past.
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cover of Britain in a Perilous World: The Strategic Defence and Security Review We Need

Britain in a Perilous World

The Strategic Defence and Security Review We Need

Jonathan Shaw

Haus Publishing, 2014

The British government periodically publishes a Strategic Defence and Security Review, an appraisal of the armed forces that seeks to understand and prepare for the defense challenges that lie ahead. This report is often controversial—the 2010 review, for example, made headlines for all the wrong reasons, as major defense projects such as the NIMROD aircraft were discontinued at huge cost, while other projects were maintained only because they were too expensive to abandon.

In advance of the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review, Jonathan Shaw argues persuasively for the need to rethink how governments and Whitehall devise their strategies and reach crucial decisions. Beginning with the review’s often imprecise use of language, Shaw challenges the assumptions that underlie the British government’s current practices. Ultimately, he suggests how Whitehall can improve its approaches and, equally important, its credibility.
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cover of Britain's War on Poverty

Britain's War on Poverty

Jane Waldfogel

Russell Sage Foundation, 2010

In 1999, one in four British children lived in poverty—the third highest child poverty rate among industrialized countries. Five years later, the child poverty rate in Britain had fallen by more than half in absolute terms. How did the British government accomplish this and what can the United States learn from the British experience? Jane Waldfogel offers a sharp analysis of the New Labour government's anti-poverty agenda, its dramatic early success and eventual stalled progress. Comparing Britain's anti-poverty initiative to U.S. welfare reform, the book shows how the policies of both countries have affected child poverty, living standards, and well-being in low-income families and suggests next steps for future reforms. Britain's War on Poverty evaluates the three-pronged anti-poverty strategy employed by the British government and what these efforts accomplished. British reforms sought to promote work and make work pay, to increase financial support for families with children, and to invest in the health, early-life development, and education of children. The latter two features set the British reforms apart from the work-oriented U.S. welfare reforms, which did not specifically target income or program supports for children. Plagued by premature initiatives and what some experts called an overly ambitious agenda, the British reforms fell short of their intended goal but nevertheless significantly increased single-parent employment, raised incomes for low-income families, and improved child outcomes. Poverty has fallen, and the pattern of low-income family expenditures on child enrichment and healthy food has begun to converge with higher-income families. As Waldfogel sees it, further success in reducing child poverty in Britain will rely on understanding who is poor and who is at highest risk. More than half of poor children live in families where at least one parent is working, followed by unemployed single- and two-parent homes, respectively. Poverty rates are also notably higher for children with disabled parents, large families, and for Pakistani and Bangladeshi children. Based on these demographics, Waldfogel argues that future reforms must, among other goals, raise working-family incomes, provide more work for single parents, and better engage high-risk racial and ethnic minority groups. What can the United States learn from the British example? Britain's War on Poverty is a primer in the triumphs and pitfalls of protracted policy. Notable differences distinguish the British and U.S. models, but Waldfogel asserts that a future U.S. poverty agenda must specifically address child poverty and the income inequality that helps create it. By any measurement and despite obstacles, Britain has significantly reduced child poverty. The book's key lesson is that it can be done.
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cover of British Diplomacy and Swedish Politics, 1758-1773

British Diplomacy and Swedish Politics, 1758-1773

Michael Roberts

University of Minnesota Press, 1980

British Diplomacy and Swedish Politics, 1758–1773 was first published in 1980. 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.

This book has three objectives; to shed light on the central issue in British foreign policy during a period inadequately explored by historians; to present, for the first time in English, an account of the dramatic last decade of Swedish "liberty" and its final overthrow by Gustavus III; and finally, to direct the attention of historians to the career of Sir John Goodricke—a diplomat whom Lor Rochford called "the best man we have abroad; you can trust him with anything—except money."

These themes are in fact inextricably linked. For Great Britain, emerging from the Seven Years War victorious but isolated, needed to safeguard her trade with Russia and British statesmen felt that an Anglo-Russian alliance could best be achieved by first concluding a treaty with Sweden to which Russia would adhere. To achieve this aim, it was essential to break French influence in Stockholm, to oust the francophile Hats from power, and to install their anglophile rivals the Caps. Thus Swedish party politics, and the Swedish constitutions, unexpectedly became matters of great consequence in Whitehall. To win the necessary victory in Stockholm Britain needed a minister of peculiar talents and no little ability. Sir John Goodricke was such a minister. And the record of his exertions, and of his eventual failure, is necessary to any proper understanding of British policy in the postwar decade.

This book is an important contribution to both British and Scandinavian history and, since it also illuminates the subject of European political relations in the eighteenth century, it will be welcomed by diplomatic historians and specialists in eighteenth-century studies as well. Michael Roberts tells his story with customary verve and grace, and effectively refutes any idea that diplomatic history need be dull.

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cover of Broadcasting Empire: The American Forces Network and the Postwar Projection of US Power

Broadcasting Empire

The American Forces Network and the Postwar Projection of US Power

Stacy Takacs

University of Illinois Press, 2026

At first a tool to boost troop morale, the Armed Forces Network (AFN) evolved into a worldwide communications system that blended entertainment with spreading American culture and helping troops understand their missions.

Stacy Takacs traces the AFN’s role in the worldwide expansion of American-style broadcasting and illuminates its impact on how foreign audiences viewed the United States. The AFN’s transformation emerged from collaborations between military leaders, foreign governments, commercial media companies, and local communities and turned the sprawling archipelago of US military bases into a potent instrument of soft power. Yet at times shifting alliances, practical problems, and the everyday routines of military life led to problems that complicated its mission

Knowledgeable and multidimensional, Broadcasting Empire combines big-picture analysis with case studies and oral history to reveal an important but overlooked tool of American influence.
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cover of Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?

Broken Ballots

Will Your Vote Count?

Douglas E. Jones and Barbara Simons

CSLI, 2012

For many of us, the presidential election of 2000 was a wake-up call. The controversy following the vote count led to demands for election reform. But the new voting systems that were subsequently introduced to the market have serious security flaws, and many are confusing and difficult to use. Moreover, legislation has not kept up with the constantly evolving voting technology, leaving little to no legal recourse when votes are improperly counted. How did we come to acquire the complex technology we now depend on to count votes?  Douglas Jones and Barbara Simons probe this question, along with public policy and regulatory issues raised by our voting technologies.  Broken Ballots is a thorough and incisive analysis of the current voting climate that approaches American elections from technological, legal, and historical perspectives.  The authors examine the ways in which Americans vote today, gauging how inaccurate, unreliable, and insecure our voting systems are. An important book for election administrators, political scientists, and students of government and technology policy, Broken Ballots is also a vital tool for any voting American.

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cover of Broken Government?

Broken Government?

Edited by Iwan Morgan and Philip D. Davies

University of London Press, 2013

Barack Obama's election as president in 2008 generated widespread hope that the United States was entering a new era whereby government, in a reversal of Ronald Reagan's famous dictum, would be the solution to the nation's manifold problems amid the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The Obama election slogan of ""Yes We Can"" seemed to voice a hope that new leadership would put right what had gone wrong with America. Anticipating a new era of government activism, some commentators read the death rites on ""The Age of Reagan,"" the post-1980 anti-statist trend of American politics. Within a short time, however, ""Yes We Can"" gave way to ""No We Can't,"" as America's government became enmeshed in gridlock and political polarization. The contributors to Broken Government? add their voices to the debate on whether American government truly is broken and, if so, what can be done to fix it.
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cover of Broken Promise: The Subversion Of U.S. Labor Relations

Broken Promise

The Subversion Of U.S. Labor Relations

James A. Gross

Temple University Press, 2003

The Wagner Act of 1935 (later the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act of 1947) was intended to democratize vast numbers of American workplaces: the federal government was to encourage worker organization and the substitution of collective bargaining for employers' unilateral determination of vital work-place matters. Yet this system of industrial democracy was never realized; the promise was "broken." In this rare inside look at the process of government regulation over the last forty-five years, James A. Gross analyzes why the promise of the policy was never fulfilled.

Gross looks at how the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB) policy-making has been influenced by the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, public opinion, resistance by organized employers, the political and economic strategies of organized labor, and the ideological dispositions of NLRB appointees. This book provides the historical perspective needed for a reevaluation of national labor policy. It delineates where we are now, how we got here, and what fundamental questions must be addressed if policy-makers are to make changes consistent with the underlying principles of democracy.

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cover of Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience

Broken Promises, Broken Dreams

Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience

Alice Rothchild

Pluto Press, 2010

The tragedies of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians are never far from the pages of the mainstream press. Yet it is rare to hear about the reality of life on the ground -- and it is rarer still when these voices belong to women.

This book records the journey of a Jewish American physician travelling and working within Israel and the Occupied Territories. Alice Rothchild grew up in a family grounded by the traumas of the Holocaust and passionately devoted to Israel. This book recounts her experiences as she grapples with the reality of life in Israel and the hardships of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.

The new edition includes a new preface, two chapters on Israeli dissent and a chapter which explores the impact of a Palestinian home demolition and the work of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters who have joined together to form Combatants for Peace.

Ultimately, the book raises troubling questions regarding US policy and the mainstream Jewish community's insistence on giving unquestioning support to all Israeli policy.

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cover of Broken Record: The Origins and Evolution of Recorded Voting in the U.S. Congress

Broken Record

The Origins and Evolution of Recorded Voting in the U.S. Congress

Michael S. Lynch & Anthony J. Madonna

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Since the 1920s, the roll call voting record has influenced American politics. Using recorded votes, candidates attack electoral opponents, interest groups attempt to drum up financial or electoral support for their preferred candidates, scholars test theories of legislative behavior, and the media characterizes the ideological leanings of Congress. Despite this, there has not been a systematic attempt to document the changing usage of the roll call record. Michael S. Lynch and Anthony J. Madonna have undertaken a massive, multiyear data collection effort that culminated in four new datasets covering from 1905 to the contemporary period. Using data on approximately 120,000 amendments, 60,000 roll call votes, 2,000 important enactments, and 8,000 special rules from 1905 to 2015, the authors demonstrate how the roll call recording system has evolved. 

Consistent with the Founders’ skepticism of the impact of recorded voting in Congress, Broken Record shows that the contemporary roll call voting record includes far more meaningless position-taking and procedural roll call votes than it did during earlier congresses. The book argues that the removal of practical barriers to roll calls, internal changes to legislative procedures, and increased electoral competitiveness have led to more roll call votes on proposals sponsored by more extreme members. In addition to policy making being more difficult, increased roll call voting has played a substantial role in artificially increasing observed levels of polarization. This book argues that solving polarization requires a more nuanced set of solutions than simply replacing legislators; it will require increased public education about how Congress operates and specific procedural reforms.
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cover of Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin: Strategies for Collective Survival

Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin

Strategies for Collective Survival

Kelly Fritsch

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

A call to remake our world through a new politics of disabled kin-making

We live in a world broken by design: a web of systems that debilitate and kill through racist and ableist infrastructural neglect, socioeconomic abandonment, and ecological negligence. Fixes for these forms of breakage often conceal and amplify harm—but what happens if we refuse to rehabilitate this inhospitable world? In Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin, Kelly Fritsch and Anne McGuire urge an alternative response through abolition, access, care, and interdependence.

Bringing a much-needed disability studies lens to discussions of public policy, legal reform, and social change, Fritsch and McGuire show how hostile social and economic structures such as racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and settler colonialism unevenly target certain populations and environments. As they trace how everyday encounters with broken infrastructures like inaccessible transit, fragmented mental health care, and crumbling educational institutions reflect broader patterns of structural abandonment and slow violence, they pose a radical means of response: the making of disabled kin. Ranging from mundane disruptions to global crises like pandemics, wars, genocides, and climate collapse, they demonstrate how disabled kin-making nurtures connection and support between people, ecologies, infrastructures, and objects, cultivating a collective “we” that can contest systems broken by design.

Urgent and passionate, Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin asks readers to reexamine conceptions of breakage, maintenance, and repair, viewing them as tools of abolition and justice. Against relentless fragmentation and atomization, this book equips us with a politics of solidarity and collectivity with which to begin making a more life-supporting world.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of Brokered Boundaries: Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times

Brokered Boundaries

Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times

Douglas S. Massey

Russell Sage Foundation, 2010

Anti-immigrant sentiment reached a fever pitch after 9/11, but its origins go back much further. Public rhetoric aimed at exposing a so-called invasion of Latino immigrants has been gaining ground for more than three decades—and fueling increasingly restrictive federal immigration policy. Accompanied by a flagging U.S. economy—record-level joblessness, bankruptcy, and income inequality—as well as waning consumer confidence, these conditions signaled one of the most hostile environments for immigrants in recent memory. In Brokered Boundaries, Douglas Massey and Magaly Sánchez untangle the complex political, social, and economic conditions underlying the rise of xenophobia in U.S. society. The book draws on in-depth interviews with Latin American immigrants in metropolitan New York and Philadelphia and—in their own words and images—reveals what life is like for immigrants attempting to integrate in anti-immigrant times. What do the social categories "Latino" and "American" actually mean to today's immigrants? Brokered Boundaries analyzes how first- and second-generation immigrants from Central and South America and the Caribbean navigate these categories and their associated meanings as they make their way through U.S. society. Massey and Sánchez argue that the mythos of immigration, in which newcomers gradually shed their respective languages, beliefs, and cultural practices in favor of a distinctly American way of life, is, in reality, a process of negotiation between new arrivals and native-born citizens. Natives control interactions with outsiders by creating institutional, social, psychological, and spatial mechanisms that delimit immigrants' access to material resources and even social status. Immigrants construct identities based on how they perceive and respond to these social boundaries. The authors make clear that today's Latino immigrants are brokering boundaries in the context of unprecedented economic uncertainty, repressive anti-immigrant legislation, and a heightening fear that upward mobility for immigrants translates into downward mobility for the native-born. Despite an absolute decline in Latino immigration, immigration-related statutes have tripled in recent years, including many that further shred the safety net for legal permanent residents as well as the undocumented. Brokered Boundaries shows that, although Latin American immigrants come from many different countries, their common reception in a hostile social environment produces an emergent Latino identity soon after arrival. During anti-immigrant times, however, the longer immigrants stay in America, the more likely they are to experience discrimination and the less likely they are to identify as Americans.
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cover of Brokers and Bureaucrats: Building Market Institutions in Russia

Brokers and Bureaucrats

Building Market Institutions in Russia

Timothy Frye

University of Michigan Press, 2000

A classic problem of social order prompts the central questions of this book: Why are some groups better able to govern themselves than others? Why do state actors sometimes delegate governing power to other bodies? How do different organizations including the state, the business community, and protection rackets come to govern different markets? Scholars have used both sociological and economic approaches to study these questions; here Timothy Frye argues for a different approach. He seeks to extend the theoretical and empirical scope of theories of self-governance beyond groups that exist in isolation from the state and suggests that social order is primarily a political problem.
Drawing on extensive interviews, surveys, and other sources, Frye addresses these question by studying five markets in contemporary Russia, including the currency futures, universal and specialized commodities, and equities markets. Using a model that depicts the effect of state policy on the prospects for self-governance, he tests theories of institutional performance and offers a political explanation for the creation of social capital, the formation of markets, and the source of legal institutions in the postcommunist world. In doing so, Frye makes a major contribution to the study of states and markets.
The book will be important reading for academic political scientists, economists (especially those who study the New Institutional Economics), legal scholars, sociologists, business-people, journalists, and students interested in transitions.
Timothy Frye is Assistant Professor of Political Science, The Ohio State University.
[more]
cover of Brokers of Power: The Financialization of the US Electricity System

Brokers of Power

The Financialization of the US Electricity System

Conor Harrison

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

A detailed look at the financial interests impacting the energy transition

The twenty-first century has seen major transformations in the US electricity sector—but while the use of coal power wanes and the need for renewable energy becomes more urgent, financial actors maintain a complicating influence on the trajectory of energy transition. Brokers of Power identifies changing patterns of investment intertwined with the shift from state-regulated electricity monopolies to a market-driven price model and the embrace of wind and solar hookups to the grid.

Drawing from case studies such as catastrophic Winter Storm Uri that hit Texas in 2021 and in-depth interviews with people working in the electricity and financial sectors, Conor Harrison reveals how the various entanglements of private equity, investment banking, and financial modeling are shaping the future and raising the costs of this vital infrastructure. Today’s financial firms, he shows, are engaged in the electricity industry beyond matters of investment: they own electricity generation infrastructure, trade electricity on markets, capture federal renewable energy tax credits, and advise on electricity firm operating strategy.

Looking beyond technology and policy, Harrison interrogates what it means to have powerful financial institutions as the primary agents of change in the fraught and ongoing energy transition. A timely and invaluable contribution to the fields of geography, environmental studies, and the energy social sciences, Brokers of Power is a cautionary account delving into the complexities surrounding the push for decarbonization.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of Brother Bill: President Clinton and the Politics of Race and Class

Brother Bill

President Clinton and the Politics of Race and Class

Daryl A Carter

University of Arkansas Press, 2016

“This book is a fascinating analysis of race and class in the age of President Bill Clinton. It provides much-needed clarity in regards to the myth of the ‘First Black President.’ It contributes much to our understanding of the history that informs our present moment!”
—Cornel West

As President Barack Obama was sworn into office on January 20, 2009, the United States was abuzz with talk of the first African American president. At this historic moment, one man standing on the inaugural platform, seemingly a relic of the past, had actually been called by the moniker the “first black president” for years.

President William Jefferson Clinton had long enjoyed the support of African Americans during his political career, but the man from Hope also had a complex and tenuous relationship with this faction of his political base. Clinton stood at the nexus of intense political battles between conservatives’ demands for a return to the past and African Americans’ demands for change and fuller equality. He also struggled with the class dynamics dividing the American electorate, especially African Americans. Those with financial means seized newfound opportunities to go to college, enter the professions, pursue entrepreneurial ambitions, and engage in mainstream politics, while those without financial means were essentially left behind. The former became key to Clinton’s political success as he skillfully negotiated the African American class structure while at the same time maintaining the support of white Americans. The results were tremendously positive for some African Americans. For others, the Clinton presidency was devastating.

Brother Bill examines President Clinton’s political relationship with African Americans and illuminates the nuances of race and class at the end of the twentieth century, an era of technological, political, and social upheaval.

[more]
cover of Brown Skin, White Masks

Brown Skin, White Masks

Hamid Dabashi

Pluto Press, 2011

In this unprecedented study, Hamid Dabashi provides a critical examination of the role that immigrant "comprador intellectuals" play in facilitating the global domination of American imperialism.  

In his pioneering book about the relationship between race and colonialism, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon explored the traumatic consequences of the sense of inferiority that colonized people felt, and how this often led them to identify with the ideology of the colonial agency. Brown Skin, White Masks picks up where Frantz Fanon left off. Dabashi extends Fanon’s insights as they apply to today's world.

Dabashi shows how intellectuals who migrate to the West are often used by the imperial powers to misrepresent their home countries. Just as many Iraqi exiles were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, Dabashi demonstrates that this is a common phenomenon, and examines why and how so many immigrant intellectuals help to sustain imperialism.

The book radically alters Edward Said’s notion of the “intellectual exile,” in order to show the negative impact of intellectual migration. Dabashi examines the ideology of cultural superiority, and provides a passionate account of how these immigrant intellectuals—rootless compradors, and guns for hire–continue to betray any notion of home or country in order to manufacture consent for imperial projects.

[more]
cover of Brunei: From the Age of Commerce to the 21st Century

Brunei

From the Age of Commerce to the 21st Century

Marie-Sybille de Vienne

National University of Singapore Press, 2015

Now an energy-rich sultanate, for centuries a important trading port in the South China Sea, Brunei has taken a different direction than its Persian Gulf peers. Immigration is restricted, and Brunei’s hydrocarbon wealth is invested conservatively, mostly outside the country.


Today home to some 393,000 inhabitants and comprising 5,765 square kilometers in area, Brunei first appears in the historical record at the end of the 10th century. After the Spanish attack of 1578, Brunei struggled to regain and expand its control on coastal West Borneo and to remain within the trading networks of the South China Sea. It later fell under British sway, and a residency was established in 1906, but it took the discovery of oil in Seria in 1929 before the colonial power began to establish the bases of a modern state.


Governed by an absolute monarchy, Bruneians today nonetheless enjoy a high level of social protection and rule of law. Ranking second (after Singapore) in Southeast Asia in terms of standards of living, the sultanate is implementing an Islamic penal code for the first time of its history. Focusing on Brunei’s political economy, history and geography, this book aims to understand the forces behind Brunei’s to-and-fro of tradition and modernisation.
[more]
cover of Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political

Bruno Latour

Reassembling the Political

Graham Harman

Pluto Press, 2014

Bruno Latour, the French sociologist, anthropologist and long-established superstar in the social sciences is revisited in this pioneering account of his ever-evolving political philosophy. Breaking from the traditional focus on his metaphysics, most recently seen in Harman’s book Prince of Networks, the author instead begins with the Hobbesian and even Machiavellian underpinnings of Latour’s early period encountering his shift towards Carl Schmitt then finishing with his final development into the Lippmann / Dewey debate. Harman brings these twists and turns into sharp focus in terms of Latour’s personal political thinking.

Along with Latour’s most important articles on political themes, the book chooses three works as exemplary of the distinct periods in Latour’s thinking: The Pasteurization of France, Politics of Nature, and the recently published An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, as his conception of politics evolves from a global power struggle between individuals, to the fabrication of fragile parliamentary networks, to just one mode of existence among many others.

[more]
cover of Brussels, the Gentle Monster: or the Disenfranchisement of Europe

Brussels, the Gentle Monster

or the Disenfranchisement of Europe

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Seagull Books, 2011

The inner workings of the European Union are as much a mystery to those living within its confines as they are to those of us who reside elsewhere. The Brussels bureaucracy that sets many of the EU’s policies feels remote to its citizens, yet the influence of its decisions can extend worldwide and throughout the global marketplace.
 
In this timely and insightful essay, Hans Magnus Enzensberger blends reportage, argument, and analysis in order to make sense of the EU’s present political and economic roles and examine the EU’s origins and inherent contradictions. In Enzensberger’s view, Europe is involved in a project without precedent—the first non-violent form of post-democratic governance, which is trying to abolish the diversity of Europe and impose a regime that is not accountable to its citizens. Its often bizarre and arbitrary rules amount to a soft but relentless guardianship, dictating how half a billion people should live their lives regardless of their own political opinions and traditions. Enzensberger here offers a strategy for approaching this modern monster—at once gentle and giant, friend and foe.
 
Praise for Enzensberger
 
“How should one cope with Germany? Let’s ask Hans Magnus Enzensberger. . . . One can only marvel at his permanent alertness, his tone of cold enragement, the dimensions of his hunger for experience, most of all however, one can only marvel at his sense of important issues. For 50 years, time and again Enzensberger has posed the right questions to German society. . . . No one should ever believe Enzensberger is on his side. Whenever someone makes a clear distinction between Good and Evil, Enzensberger will jump out of his cover and shout: It’s not that simple.”—Florian Illies, Die Zeit
[more]
cover of Brutal Fantasies: Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War

Brutal Fantasies

Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War

Christine Kim

Duke University Press, 2025

In Brutal Fantasies, Christine Kim examines how Western cultural representations of North Korea depend on fantasies of the inhuman. Drawing on films, fiction, and defectors’ life writings from the last two decades, Kim analyzes how these representations construct North Korea as a site of brutality and inhumanity. She recasts these stories through Asian American and global Asian frameworks that move beyond common Cold War binaries to critique how US imperialism persists in global understandings of North Korea. Kim shows how human rights discourses simultaneously instrumentalize and dehumanize North Korea while demonstrating that North Korea is a site of contradiction that complicates Western interpretive constraints. She also explores the Korean diaspora’s complex relationship with North Korea and highlights the vulnerability and marginalization of diasporic subjects. In so doing, Kim pulls back the veil on prevailing cultural myths enshrouding North Korea, offering alternative ways of understanding its role in global and regional imaginaries.
[more]
cover of Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930

Budapest and New York

Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930

Thomas Bender

Russell Sage Foundation, 1994

Little over a century ago, New York and Budapest were both flourishing cities engaging in spectacular modernization. By 1930, New York had emerged as an innovating cosmopolitan metropolis, while Budapest languished under the conditions that would foster fascism. Budapest and New York explores the increasingly divergent trajectories of these once-similar cities through the perspectives of both Hungarian and American experts in the fields of political, cultural, social and art history. Their original essays illuminate key aspects of urban life that most reveal the turn-of-the-century evolution of New York and Budapest: democratic participation, use of public space, neighborhood ethnicity, and culture high and low. What comes across most strikingly in these essays is New York's cultivation of social and political pluralism, a trend not found in Budapest. Nationalist ideology exerted tremendous pressure on Budapest's ethnic groups to assimilate to a single Hungarian language and culture. In contrast, New York's ethnic diversity was transmitted through a mass culture that celebrated ethnicity while muting distinct ethnic traditions, making them accessible to a national audience. While Budapest succumbed to the patriotic imperatives of a nation threatened by war, revolution, and fascism, New York, free from such pressures, embraced the variety of its people and transformed its urban ethos into a paradigm for America. Budapest and New York is the lively story of the making of metropolitan culture in Europe and America, and of the influential relationship between city and nation. In unifying essays, the editors observe comparisons not only between the cities, but in the scholarly outlooks and methodologies of Hungarian and American histories. This volume is a unique urban history. Begun under the unfavorable conditions of a divided world, it represents a breakthrough in cross-cultural, transnational, and interdisciplinary historical work.
[more]
cover of Building America

Building America

Harry Boyte

Temple University Press, 1996

"...a marvelous piece of work. This is a book much needed, and deeply appreciated by those of us sometimes so mired in our corners of the world that we forget how many others there are out there with us." --Deborah Meier, author of The Power of Their Ideas and director of Central Park East Schools Throughout history, work has always been the taproot of American democracy, enabling diverse people to forge connections with each other and to address the nation's problems. Through work, people gain greater visibility, authority, and a larger intellectual horizon. They come to see themselves as creators of their communities, stakeholders in the country, and guardians of the commonwealth. Building America, in a pathbreaking analysis of diverse civic practices, argues that work is the center of effective citizenship. As late as the New Deal Era, Abraham Lincoln's idea of work-centered government remained vibrant and fueled reform movements like union organizing. Many jobs, local schools, community groups, the Civilian Conservation Corp., and other settings provided rich experiences in public work. Images of work filled popular culture--Will Rogers movies, Langston Hughes's poetry, post office art. But today, work has lost its larger meaning, and government has become largely a service provider. From low income communities to colleges, high-tech newspapers to government agencies and schools, Harry C. Boyte and Nancy N. Kari look to the revival of public-spirited work as a key to the rebirth of democracy in our time. Their exploration of the larger meanings of work leads to provocatively different approaches to change. These include many examples of citizen-government partnership in solving problems. By working on school reform and economic development in Baltimore, the mainly black group BUILD created a public space for overcoming searing racial divisions. Boyte and Kari explore new initiatives like the public journalism movement aimed at strengthening journalists' responsibilities to improve democracy. They offer lessons for turning jobs into public work in our changing economy. Building America concludes with a call for national action to renew the idea of "government by the people" through public work. "Harry Boyte and Nancy Kari make an invaluable contribution by reminding us that democracy is about action, solving problems, and all that is implied in 'public work.'" --David Mathews, President, Kettering Foundation "Harry Boyte and Nancy Kari have captured the words and music of Americans doing the serious work of democracy. They show us the path to restoring vitality to the American experience." --David Cohen, Co-director, Advocacy Institute
[more]
cover of Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami

Building Back Better in India

Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami

Raja Swamy

University of Alabama Press, 2021

Disaster, development, and the struggle for coastal livelihoods in post-tsunami India.

Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami addresses the ways in which natural disasters impact the strategies and priorities of neoliberalizing states in the contemporary era. In the light of growing scholarly and public concern over “disaster capitalism” and the tendency of states and powerful international financial institutions to view disasters as “opportunities” to “build back better,” Raja Swamy offers an ethnographically rich account of post-disaster reconstruction, its contested aims, and the mixed outcomes of state policy, humanitarian aid, and local resistance. Using the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as a case study, Swamy investigates the planning and implementation of a reconstruction process that sought to radically transform the geography of a coastal district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted in Tamil Nadu’s Nagapattinam District, Swamy shows how and why the state-led, multilaterally financed, and NGO-mediated reconstruction prioritized the displacement of coastal fisher populations. Exploring the substantive differences shaping NGO action, specifically in response to core political questions affecting the well-being of their ostensible beneficiaries, this account also centers the political agency of disaster survivors and their allies among NGOs in contesting the meanings of recovery while navigating the process of reconstruction.

If humanitarian aid brought together NGOs and fishers as givers and recipients of aid, it also revealed in its workings competing and sometimes contradictory assumptions, goals, interests, and strategies driving the fraught historical relationship between artisanal fishers and the state. Importantly, this research foregrounds the ambiguous role of NGOs involved in the distribution of aid, as well as the agency and strategic actions of the primary recipients of aid—the fishers of Nagapattinam—as they struggled with a reconstruction process that made receipt of the humanitarian gift of housing conditional on the formal abandonment of all claims to the coast. Building Back Better in India thus bridges scholarly concerns with disasters, humanitarianism, and economic development with those focused on power, agency, and resistance.

[more]
cover of Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting

Building Character

The Art and Science of Casting

Amy Cook

University of Michigan Press, 2018

What can we learn about how we understand each other and ourselves by examining the casting we find on stage and film—the casting we find perfect and the casting we find wrong? Building Character examines how the process of “casting” an actor in a part creates a character and how this can be usefully understood through deploying theories from the cognitive sciences. A casting director may match the perceived qualities of an actor with the perceived qualities of the character, but the combination is also synergistic; casting a character creates qualities. While casting directors do this professionally, all of us do this when we make sense of the people around us. This book argues that we build the characters of others from a sea of stimuli and that the process of watching actors take on roles improves our ability to “cast” those roles in our daily lives. Amy Cook examines the visible celebrity casting, such as Robert Downey Jr. as Ironman or Judi Dench as Bond’s M, the political casting of one candidate as “presidential” and another as “weak,” the miscasting of racial profiling and sexual assault, and the counter casting that results when actors and characters are not where or who we expect.
[more]
cover of Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery

Building Resilience

Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery

Daniel P. Aldrich

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Each year, natural disasters threaten the strength and stability of communities worldwide. Yet responses to the challenges of recovery vary greatly and in ways that aren’t explained by the magnitude of the catastrophe or the amount of aid provided by national governments or the international community. The difference between resilience and disrepair, as Daniel P. Aldrich shows, lies in the depth of communities’ social capital.
 
Building Resilience highlights the critical role of social capital in the ability of a community to withstand disaster and rebuild both the infrastructure and the ties that are at the foundation of any community. Aldrich examines the post-disaster responses of four distinct communities—Tokyo following the 1923 earthquake, Kobe after the 1995 earthquake, Tamil Nadu after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina—and finds that those with robust social networks were better able to coordinate recovery. In addition to quickly disseminating information and financial and physical assistance, communities with an abundance of social capital were able to minimize the migration of people and valuable resources out of the area.
 
With governments increasingly overstretched and natural disasters likely to increase in frequency and intensity, a thorough understanding of what contributes to efficient reconstruction is more important than ever. Building Resilience underscores a critical component of an effective response.
[more]
cover of Building Something Better: Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change

Building Something Better

Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change

Stephanie A. Malin

Rutgers University Press, 2022

As the turmoil of interlinked crises unfolds across the world—from climate change to growing inequality to the rise of authoritarian governments—social scientists examine what is happening and why. Can communities devise alternatives to the systems that are doing so much harm to the planet and people?
 
Sociologists Stephanie A. Malin and Meghan Elizbeth Kallman offer a clear, accessible volume that demonstrates the ways that communities adapt in the face of crises and explains that sociology can help us understand how and why they do this challenging work. Tackling neoliberalism head-on, these communities are making big changes by crafting distributive and regenerative systems that depart from capitalist approaches. The vivid case studies presented range from activist water protectors to hemp farmers to renewable energy cooperatives led by Indigenous peoples and nations. Alongside these studies, Malin and Kallman present incisive critiques of colonialism, extractive capitalism, and neoliberalism, while demonstrating how sociology’s own disciplinary traditions have been complicit with those ideologies—and must expand beyond them.
 
Showing that it is possible to challenge social inequality and environmental degradation by refusing to continue business-as-usual, Building Something Better offers both a call to action and a dose of hope in a time of crises.
[more]
cover of Building a Legislative-Centered Public Administration: Congress and the Administrative State, 1946-1999

Building a Legislative-Centered Public Administration

Congress and the Administrative State, 1946-1999

David Rosenbloom

University of Alabama Press, 2002

2001 Louis Brownlow Award from the National Academy of Public Administration

Reimagining public administration through the lens of constitutional governance and legislative intent.

Before 1946 the congressional role in public administration had been limited to authorization, funding, and review of federal administrative operations, which had grown rapidly as a result of the New Deal and the Second World War. But in passing the Administrative Procedure Act and the Legislative Reorganization Act that pivotal year, Congress self-consciously created for itself a comprehensive role in public administration. Reluctant to delegate legislative authority to federal agencies, Congress decided to treat the agencies as extensions of itself and established a framework for comprehensive regulation of the agencies' procedures. Additionally, Congress reorganized itself so it could provide continuous supervision of federal agencies.

Rosenbloom shows how these 1946 changes in the congressional role in public administration laid the groundwork for future major legislative acts, including the Freedom of Information Act (1966), Privacy Act (1974), Government in the Sunshine Act (1976), Paperwork Reduction Acts (1980, 1995), Chief Financial Officers Act (1990), and Small Business Regulatory Fairness Enforcement Act (1996). Each of these acts, and many others, has contributed to the legislative-centered public administration that Congress has formed over the past 50 years.

This first book-length study of the subject provides a comprehensive explanation of the institutional interests, values, and logic behind the contemporary role of Congress in federal administration and attempts to move the public administration field beyond condemning legislative "micromanagement" to understanding why Congress values it.

[more]
cover of Building a New Educational State: Foundations, Schools, and the American South

Building a New Educational State

Foundations, Schools, and the American South

Joan Malczewski

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Building a New Educational State examines the dynamic process of black education reform during the Jim Crow era in North Carolina and Mississippi. Through extensive archival research, Joan Malczewski explores the initiatives of foundations and reformers at the top, the impact of their work at the state and local level, and the agency of southerners—including those in rural black communities—to demonstrate the importance of schooling to political development in the South. Along the way, Malczewski challenges us to reevaluate the relationships among political actors involved in education reform.
            Malczewski presents foundation leaders as self-conscious state builders and policy entrepreneurs who aimed to promote national ideals through a public system of education—efforts they believed were especially critical in the South. Black education was an important component of this national agenda. Through extensive efforts to create a more centralized and standard system of public education aimed at bringing isolated and rural black schools into the public system, schools became important places for expanding the capacity of state and local governance. Schooling provided opportunities to reorganize local communities and augment black agency in the process. When foundations realized they could not unilaterally impose their educational vision on the South, particularly in black communities, they began to collaborate with locals, thereby opening political opportunity in rural areas. Unfortunately, while foundations were effective at developing the institutional configurations necessary for education reform, they were less successful at implementing local programs consistently due to each state’s distinctive political and institutional context.
[more]
cover of Building a New Legal Order for the Oceans

Building a New Legal Order for the Oceans

Tommy Koh

National University of Singapore Press, 2019

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, has been called a constitution for the oceans. It keeps order in the world’s oceans and regulates nations’ use of their natural resources. Tommy Koh served as president of the third convention, a multi-year meeting that resulted in this important treaty for the government of the global commons. In Building a New Legal Order for the Oceans, Koh brings a unique, insider’s perspective on the UNCLOS negotiation process, and the concepts, tensions, and intentions that underlie today’s Law of the Sea.

In this book, Koh fully explains the many new concepts of international law that arose from UNCLOS III, such as the Exclusive Economic Zone, Archipelagic State, Straits Used for International Navigation, Transit Passage, Archipelagic Sealane Passage, and the Common Heritage of Mankind. He also discusses current threats to maritime security and explains the intricacies of the disputes in the South China Sea. Koh asks What can be learned from the success of UNCLOS? How can we build on that success and manage the new tensions that arise in the Law of the Sea? There is no better guide to this aspect of international law than Koh.
[more]
cover of Building a New World Order: Sustainable Policies for the Future

Building a New World Order

Sustainable Policies for the Future

Harald Müller

Haus Publishing, 2009

Building a New World Order: Sustainable Policies for the Future demonstrates how the conditions for sustainable development might be created, and why all our futures are dependent on a global engagement and involvement, not just that of a few selected statesmen.
[more]
cover of Building the American Republic, Volume 1: A Narrative History to 1877

Building the American Republic, Volume 1

A Narrative History to 1877

Harry L. Watson

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Building the American Republic combines centuries of perspectives and voices into a fluid narrative of the United States. Throughout their respective volumes, Harry L. Watson and Jane Dailey take care to integrate varied scholarly perspectives and work to engage a diverse readership by addressing what we all share: membership in a democratic republic, with joint claims on its self-governing tradition. It will be one of the first peer-reviewed American history textbooks to be offered completely free in digital form. Visit buildingtheamericanrepublic.org for more information. 

Volume 1 starts at sea and ends on the battlefield. Beginning with the earliest Americans and the arrival of strangers on the eastern shore, it then moves through colonial society to the fight for independence and the construction of a federalist republic. From there, it explains the renegotiations and refinements that took place as a new nation found its footing, and it traces the actions that eventually rippled into the Civil War.

This volume goes beyond famous names and battles to incorporate politics, economics, science, arts, and culture. And it shows that issues that resonate today—immigration, race, labor, gender roles, and the power of technology—have been part of the American fabric since the very beginning.
[more]
cover of Building the American Republic, Volume 2: A Narrative History from 1877

Building the American Republic, Volume 2

A Narrative History from 1877

Jane Dailey

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Building the American Republic combines centuries of perspectives and voices into a fluid narrative of the United States. Throughout their respective volumes, Harry L. Watson and Jane Dailey take care to integrate varied scholarly perspectives and work to engage a diverse readership by addressing what we all share: membership in a democratic republic, with joint claims on its self-governing tradition. It will be one of the first peer-reviewed American history textbooks to be offered completely free in digital form. Visit buildingtheamericanrepublic.org for more information. 

The American nation came apart in a violent civil war less than a century after ratification of the Constitution. When it was reborn five years later, both the republic and its Constitution were transformed. Volume 2 opens as America struggles to regain its footing, reeling from a presidential assassination and facing massive economic growth, rapid demographic change, and combustive politics.

The next century and a half saw the United States enter and then dominate the world stage, even as the country struggled to live up to its own principles of liberty, justice, and equality. Volume 2 of Building the American Republic takes the reader from the Gilded Age to the present, as the nation becomes an imperial power, rethinks the Constitution, witnesses the rise of powerful new technologies, and navigates an always-shifting cultural landscape shaped by an increasingly diverse population. Ending with the 2016 election, this volume provides a needed reminder that the future of the American republic depends on a citizenry that understands—and can learn from—its history.
 
[more]
cover of Building the Cold War Consensus: The Political Economy of U.S. National Security Policy, 1949-51

Building the Cold War Consensus

The Political Economy of U.S. National Security Policy, 1949-51

Benjamin O. Fordham

University of Michigan Press, 1998

In 1950, the U.S. military budget more than tripled while plans for a national health care system and other new social welfare programs disappeared from the agenda. At the same time, the official campaign against the influence of radicals in American life reached new heights. Benjamin Fordham suggests that these domestic and foreign policy outcomes are closely related. The Truman administration's efforts to fund its ambitious and expensive foreign policy required it to sacrifice much of its domestic agenda and acquiesce to conservative demands for a campaign against radicals in the labor movement and elsewhere.
Using a statistical analysis of the economic sources of support and opposition to the Truman Administration's foreign policy, and a historical account of the crucial period between the summer of 1949 and the winter of 1951, Fordham integrates the political struggle over NSC 68, the decision to intervene in the Korean War, and congressional debates over the Fair Deal, McCarthyism and military spending. The Truman Administration's policy was politically successful not only because it appealed to internationally oriented sectors of the U.S. economy, but also because it was linked to domestic policies favored by domestically oriented, labor-sensitive sectors that would otherwise have opposed it.
This interpretation of Cold War foreign policy will interest political scientists and historians concerned with the origins of the Cold War, American social welfare policy, McCarthyism, and the Korean War, and the theoretical argument it advances will be of interest broadly to scholars of U.S. foreign policy, American politics, and international relations theory.
Benjamin O. Fordham is Assistant Professor of Political Science, State University of New York at Albany.
[more]
cover of Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate States Policy for the United States Presidential Contest

Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric

Confederate States Policy for the United States Presidential Contest

Larry E. Nelson

University of Alabama Press, 1980

A fascinating study of Confederate perceptions of and attempts to manipulate the 1864 US presidential election

The Confederacy's hopes for independence were founded less on the belief that the South could defeat the North than on a strategy of staving off defeat long enough for the North to weary of the fight. The South’s single biggest opportunity to effect political change in the North was the presidential contest of 1864. If Lincoln’s support foundered and the North elected a president with a more flexible vision of peace on the continent, the South might realize its dream of independence.

Praised as an important contribution to understanding the Davis administration, in Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, Larry Nelson vividly brings to life the complex state of Northern and Southern internal politics during the election year of 1863. He recounts fluctuations in the value of the dollar, draft resistance and riots, protests against emancipation, political defeats suffered by the Republicans in the elections of 1862, and growing discontent in the border states and Midwest. This gripping account explores a mission Davis sent to Canada in 1864 seeking to influence the election of a new US president, a strategy Nelson's persuasive analysis shows to have been intelligent and reasonable. Nevertheless, Davis's haphazard leadership contributed to its failure. Nelson hypothesizes that had Davis drawn the North into negotiations before the Democratic convention for the upcoming elections, a temporary armistice might well have proved permanent. 
 
Nelson offers an insider’s look at the administration of Jefferson Davis as it searched for cracks in Northern unity and electoral opportunities to exploit—and yet also as it overlooked war-weariness in the South itself. Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric is an engrossing account of a little-known but critical aspect of Civil War statecraft and politics.
[more]
cover of Bureaucracy in America: The Administrative State's Challenge to Constitutional Government

Bureaucracy in America

The Administrative State's Challenge to Constitutional Government

Joseph Postell

University of Missouri Press, 2023

The rise of the administrative state is the most significant political development in American politics over the past century. While our Constitution separates powers into three branches, and requires that the laws are made by elected representatives in the Congress, today most policies are made by unelected officials in agencies where legislative, executive, and judicial powers are combined. This threatens constitutionalism and the rule of law. This book examines the history of administrative power in America and argues that modern administrative law has failed to protect the principles of American constitutionalism as effectively as earlier approaches to regulation and administration.
[more]
cover of Bureaucracy vs. Environment: The Environmental Costs of Bureaucratic Governance

Bureaucracy vs. Environment

The Environmental Costs of Bureaucratic Governance

John Baden and Richard L. Stroup, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1981

Bureaucracy vs. Environment: The Environmental Costs of Bureaucratic Governance explores a provocative and under-examined reality: that the very institutions created to protect and manage America’s natural resources often become the source of environmental harm. Edited by John Baden and Richard L. Stroup and featuring contributions from prominent economists and policy analysts, this volume challenges the widely held assumption that bureaucratic governance and collective management are inherently more environmentally responsible than private enterprise.Drawing on frameworks such as property rights theory and public choice economics, the book demonstrates that when authority to manage resources is separated from responsibility for the consequences, self-interest and perverse incentives drive public decision-makers—just as they do in the private sector. Bureaucrats, operating outside the discipline of market pressures and profits, may consistently expand their agencies’ activities for personal or institutional gain, often at the expense of both taxpayers and the environment. Case studies on water management, public lands grazing, and energy policy show how these distorted incentives can lead to overexploitation, inefficiency, and environmental degradation.The collection not only critiques misplaced trust in bureaucratic benevolence but also highlights a surprising potential alliance between environmentalists and advocates of market-based solutions. The contributors argue that genuine environmental stewardship requires institutional reforms that link authority with responsibility, foster accountability, and harness incentives for efficiency.Both a warning and a call to action, Bureaucracy vs. Environment provides vital analytical tools for policymakers, scholars, and citizens interested in how to realistically align public institutions with the goals of environmental sustainability and economic sense. The book stands as a seminal contribution to the ongoing debate over the best ways to protect natural resources in the face of complex political and economic pressures.
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cover of Bureaucratizing the Muse: Public Funds and the Cultural Worker

Bureaucratizing the Muse

Public Funds and the Cultural Worker

Steven C. Dubin

University of Chicago Press, 1987

The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act made a dramatic entrace on the American economic and social stage in December 1973. No comparable commitment of public funds to subsidize jobs had occurred since the Works Progress Administration programs of the 1930s. An important beneficiary of CETA was the Artists-in-Residence program, in operation from 1977 to 1981. As part of the largest direct monetary transfer to artists since the WPA, AIR employed 108 Chicago-area artists each year in nine fields—from dance and music to video and graphic arts.

Bureaucratizing the Muse is a study of the Chicago AIR program. By its very nature art is a nonrational process, even at times antirational, and the idea of organizing artists in this kind of work environment was an unusual one. Steven C. Dubin's account is a fascinating story of the tensions between struggling artists who need a paycheck but fear the compromise of their art and bureaucrats who need to produce measurable results.
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cover of Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers: The Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico

Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers

The Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico

By Susan Deans-Smith

University of Texas Press, 1992

Honorable Mention, Bolton Memorial Prize, Conference on Latin American History

A government monopoly provides an excellent case study of state-society relationships. This is especially true of the tobacco monopoly in colonial Mexico, whose revenues in the later half of the eighteenth century were second only to the silver tithe as the most valuable source of government income. This comprehensive study of the tobacco monopoly illuminates many of the most important themes of eighteenth-century Mexican social and economic history, from issues of economic growth and the supply of agricultural credit to rural relations, labor markets, urban protest and urban workers, class formation, work discipline, and late colonial political culture.

Drawing on exhaustive research of previously unused archival sources, Susan Deans-Smith examines a wide range of new questions. Who were the bureaucrats who managed this colonial state enterprise and what policies did they adopt to develop it? How profitable were the tobacco manufactories, and how rational was their organization? What impact did the reorganization of the tobacco trade have upon those people it affected most—the tobacco planters and tobacco workers?

This research uncovers much that was not previously known about the Bourbon government's management of the tobacco monopoly and the problems and limitations it faced. Deans-Smith finds that there was as much continuity as change after the monopoly's establishment, and that the popular response was characterized by accommodation, as well as defiance and resistance. She argues that the problems experienced by the monopoly at the beginning of the nineteenth century did not originate from any simmering, entrenched opposition. Rather, an emphasis upon political stability and short-term profits prevented any innovative reforms that might have improved the monopoly's long-term performance and productivity.

With detailed quantitative data and rare material on the urban working poor of colonial Mexico, Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers will be important reading for all students of social, economic, and labor history, especially of Mexico and Latin America.

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cover of Burek: A Culinary Metaphor

Burek

A Culinary Metaphor

Jernej Mlekuz

Central European University Press, 2015

“As simple as burek” is a popular phrase used by many young people in Slovenia. In this book Jernej Mlekuž maintains that the truth is just the opposite. The burek is a pie made of pastry dough filled with various fillings that is well-known in the Balkans, and also in Turkey and the Near East by other names. Whether on the plate or as a cultural artifact, it is in fact, not that simple. After a brief stroll through its innocent history, Mlekuž focuses on the present state of the burek, after parasitical ideologies had attached themselves to it and poisoned its discourses. In Slovenia, the burek has become a loaded metaphor for the Balkans and immigrants from the republics of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Without the burek it would be equally difficult to consider the jargon of Slovenian youth, the imagined world of Slovenian chauvinism and the rhetorical arsenal of advertising agents when promoting healthy foods. In this analysis, Mlekuž refers to the burek as the “metaburek.” All at the same time it is greasy, Balkan, Slovene, not-Slovene, Yugoslavian, familiar, foreign, the greatest, the worst, disturbingly unhealthy, plebeian, junk food, and finally, a cherub (burek spelled backwards is kerub, the Slovene word for cherub). And this metaburek, the protagonist of this book, is never a completely pure, innocent, unconditioned burek. It is much more. A word of warning: after consuming this text, the burek will never be the same.
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cover of Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now

Burgers in Blackface

Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now

Naa Oyo A. Kwate

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Exposes and explores the prevalence of racist restaurant branding in the United States 

Aunt Jemima is the face of pancake mix. Uncle Ben sells rice. Chef Rastus shills for Cream of Wheat. Stereotyped Black faces and bodies have long promoted retail food products that are household names. Much less visible to the public are the numerous restaurants that deploy unapologetically racist logos, themes, and architecture. These marketing concepts, which center nostalgia for a racist past and commemoration of our racist present, reveal the deeply entrenched American investment in anti-blackness. Drawing on wide-ranging sources from the late 1800s to the present, Burgers in Blackface gives a powerful account, and rebuke, of historical and contemporary racism in restaurant branding.

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

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cover of Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia

Buried Histories

The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia

John Roosa

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

In 1965–66, army-organized massacres claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia. Very few of these atrocities have been studied in any detail, and answers to basic questions remain unclear. What was the relationship between the army and civilian militias? How could the perpetrators come to view unarmed individuals as dangerous enemies of the nation? Why did Communist Party supporters, who numbered in the millions, not resist?
Drawing upon years of research and interviews with survivors, Buried Histories is an impressive contribution to the literature on genocide and mass atrocity, crucially addressing the topics of media, military organization, economic interests, and resistance.
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