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In the early 2010s electoral disputes in Ghana garnered global attention and raised questions concerning the nature and future of democratic practice in postcolonial countries. In Deliberating Ghana: Postcolonial Rhetorics, Culture, and Democracy Stephen Kwame Dadugblor examines these disputes as they unfolded in Ghana’s Supreme Court and in the public domain. Reading a diverse set of materials including courtroom discourse, social media artifacts, documentaries, parliamentary records, and op-eds, Dadugblor theorizes a cultural imaginaries orientation as a viable approach for understanding and decolonizing knowledge of democratic practice frequently tethered to Western epistemologies and conceptions. Organized around four key ideas about deliberation—the notion of speech, the utility of genre, the promises and perils of digital political participation, and the politics of memory—Deliberating Ghana situates rhetorical studies of democracy within African epistemologies, calling attention to how centering the postcolony can contribute to moving beyond well-worn binaries of West/non-West in studies of rhetoric, democracy, and deliberation, and toward decolonial possibilities. It offers fresh perspectives on foregrounding a society’s indigenous knowledge and the messiness of its socio-political and rhetorical traditions to intervene in debates about the politics of knowledge production.

In 2017, Seattle inaugurated a new way for citizens to be involved in democracy: they introduced publicly financed vouchers for voters to donate to local candidates. The innovative plan is designed to level the playing field in campaign financing. Through the vouchers, residents allocate dollars to candidates of their choice in local elections, putting political money directly in the hands of voters. The intent is to increase political participation and ameliorate the long-standing representational inequalities of private donations.

Democracy Vouchers and the Promise of Fairer Elections in Seattle critically evaluates the success and impact of this program. Jennifer Heerwig and Brian J. McCabe emphasize how local elections now attract a much wider and more diverse field of both donors and candidates. They also consider external threats to the program, from litigation about the constitutionality of a voucher program to the rise of independent expenditures.

Offering important lessons on how other cities can adopt a similar program, this compelling case study also highlights the obstacles that will likely arise in its implementation.

America faces daunting problems—stagnant wages, high health care costs, neglected schools, deteriorating public services. How did we get here? Through decades of dysfunctional government. In Democracy in America? veteran political observers Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens marshal an unprecedented array of evidence to show that while other countries have responded to a rapidly changing economy by helping people who’ve been left behind, the United States has failed to do so.  Instead, we have actually exacerbated inequality, enriching corporations and the wealthy while leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves.
 
What’s the solution? More democracy. More opportunities for citizens to shape what their government does. To repair our democracy, Page and Gilens argue, we must change the way we choose candidates and conduct our elections, reform our governing institutions, and curb the power of money in politics. By doing so, we can reduce polarization and gridlock, address pressing challenges, and enact policies that truly reflect the interests of average Americans.
 
Updated with new information, this book lays out a set of proposals that would boost citizen participation, curb the power of money, and democratize the House and Senate. 

On January 6, 2021, an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. This assault on America’s democratic system was orchestrated by then President Donald Trump, abetted by his political party, and supported by a vocal minority of the American people. Did denial of the election results and the subsequent insurrection inflict damage on American political institutions? While most pundits and many scholars say yes, they have offered little rigorous evidence for this assertion. In Democracy’s Destruction? political scientist James L. Gibson uses surveys from representative samples of the American population to provide a more informed answer to the question.
 
Focusing on the U.S. Supreme Court, the presidency, and the U.S. Senate, Gibson reveals that how people assessed the election, the insurrection, and even the second Trump impeachment has little connection to their willingness to view American political institutions as legitimate. Instead, legitimacy is grounded in more general commitments to democratic values and support for the rule of law. On most issues of institutional legitimacy, those who denied the election results and supported the insurrection were not more likely to be alienated from political institutions and to consider them illegitimate.
 
Gibson also investigates whether Black people might have responded differently to the events of the 2020 election and its aftermath. He finds that in comparison to the White majority, Black Americans were less supportive of America’s democratic institutions and of democratic values, such as reverence for the rule of law, because they often have directly experienced unfair treatment by legal authorities. But he emphasizes that the actions of Trump and his followers are not the cause of those weaker commitments.
 
Democracy’s Destruction? offers rigorous analysis of the effect of the Trump insurrection on the state of U.S. democracy today. While cautioning that Trump and many Republicans may be devising schemes to subvert the next presidential election more effectively, the book attests to the remarkable endurance of American political institutions.