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Why have Latin American democracies proven unable to confront the structural inequalities that cripple their economies and stymie social mobility? Brian Palmer-Rubin contends that we may lay the blame on these countries’ systems of interest representation, which exhibit “biased pluralism,” a system in which the demands of organizations representing economic elites—especially large corporations—predominate. A more inclusive model of representation would not only require a more encompassing and empowered set of institutions to represent workers, but would also feature spaces for non-eliteproducers—such as farmers and small-business owners to have a say in sectoral economic policies.

With analysis drawing on over 100 interviews, an original survey, and official government data, this book focuses on such organizations and develops an account of biased pluralism in developing countries typified by the centrality of patronage—discretionarily allocated state benefits. Rather than serving as conduits for demand-making about development models, political parties and interest organizations often broker state subsidies or social programs, augmenting the short-term income of beneficiaries, but doing little to improve their long-term economic prospects. When organizations become diverted into patronage politics, the economic demands of the masses go unheard in the policies that most affect their lives, and along the way, their economic interests go unrepresented.

An authoritative student guide for how to evaluate complex public health interventions.

Public health interventions include any effort or policy that attempts to improve the well-being of individuals or an entire population. They can be run by governmental health departments or non-governmental organizations and can include educational programs, screening programs, vaccination programs, environmental improvements, and health promotion campaigns. Interventions that include multiple independent or interacting components are referred to as complex. Evaluating and predicting the efficacy of any public health intervention, as well as calculating the cost effectiveness, is essential. Using examples from multiple published studies conducted around the world, this textbook shows readers how to evaluate public health interventions in real-world settings. It will enable readers to understand how to investigate whether a public health intervention works, for whom, when, where, how, and why. It provides a comprehensive introduction to key areas of evaluation, including understanding complex interventions, developing program theories, community engagement in evaluation, and the main methods used in process, impact, and economic evaluation. It explains how different methods can be used individually and in combination to answer different kinds of evaluation questions and at different phases in an evaluation cycle and considers how the results of evaluations can be brought together to inform action.

In Spain and Argentina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anarchists sought to build their ideal society in the present rather than wait for the revolution. These radicals built their daily lives around their beliefs—a far-sighted cultural project that shaped education, family life, leisure time, and moral values.

Nathaniel Andrews looks at life in four communities to explore how anarchists fused radical politics with the everyday. As Andrews shows, anarchists created networks across the Atlantic that not only shared people and ideas, but practices, too. Small actions—picnics, childrearing, using time differently—became a part of pursuing larger political goals. But these practices also revealed tensions within the movement by highlighting the gap separating ideas and actions, particularly in matters of gender.

Vivid and surprising, <i>Everyday Anarchism</i> reveals a daring program to model a radical society within the very world anarchism hoped to transform.

How the everyday habits and attitudes of ordinary liberals and conservatives shape the health of American democracy.

In Everyday Democracy, Jeffrey M. Berry, James M. Glaser, and Deborah J. Schildkraut study Americans’ views of several manifestations of “everyday democracy,” which they define as the attitudes, behaviors, and processes that people experience in daily life and their routine considerations of politics and community. Examples include engaging in dialogue with political opponents and giving politicians license to compromise. Ordinary political moments like these constitute much of politics, and they can lay the foundation that shapes if, when, and how crisis moments unfold.

Paying particular attention to the role of ideology in shaping how Americans emulate daily democratic ideals, this book considers such questions as: How do liberals and conservatives support different aspects of democratic practice, and are there ideological asymmetries between the two groups? If and when asymmetries emerge, what factors might explain them? The authors consider what their findings mean for the health of American democracy broadly.

Exposing the powerful contradictions between empowering rights and legal rites

By investigating the harms routinely experienced by the victims and survivors of domestic violence, both inside and outside of law, Everyday Harm studies the limits of what domestic violence law can--and cannot--accomplish. Combining detailed ethnographic research and theoretical analysis, Mindie Lazarus-Black illustrates the ways persistent cultural norms and ingrained bureaucratic procedures work to unravel laws designed to protect the safety of society’s most vulnerable people.

Lazarus-Black’s fieldwork in Trinidad traces a story with global implications about why and when people gain the right to ask the court for protection from violence, and what happens when they pursue those rights in court. Why is itthat, in spite of laws designed to empower subordinated people, so little results from that legislation? What happens in and around courts that makes it so difficult for people to obtain their legally available rights and protections? In the case of domestic violence law, what can such legislation mean for women’s empowerment, gender equity, and protection? How do cultural norms and practices intercept the law?

How institutional and interpersonal policing have been central to worldmaking

Policing is constitutive of colonial modernity: normalizing, internalizing, and legalizing anti-Black violence as the ongoing condition for white life and freedom. The result, Tia Trafford argues here, is a situation where we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. From the plantation to the prison, global apartheid, and pandemic control, this book examines why and how policing has become the most ingrained, commonsense—and insidious—way of managing our world.

In this compelling and comprehensive look at the rise of Evo Morales and Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), Linda Farthing and Benjamin Kohl offer a thoughtful evaluation of the transformations ushered in by the western hemisphere’s first contemporary indigenous president. Accessible to all readers, Evo’s Bolivia not only charts Evo’s rise to power but also offers a history of and context for the MAS revolution’s place in the rising “pink tide” of the political left. Farthing and Kohl examine the many social movements whose agendas have set the political climate in Bolivia and describe the difficult conditions the administration inherited. They evaluate the results of Evo’s policies by examining a variety of measures, including poverty; health care and education reform; natural resources and development; and women’s, indigenous, and minority rights. Weighing the positive with the negative, the authors offer a balanced assessment of the results and shortcomings of the first six years of the Morales administration.

At the heart of this book are the voices of Bolivians themselves. Farthing and Kohl interviewed women and men in government, in social movements, and on the streets throughout the country, and their diverse backgrounds and experiences offer a multidimensional view of the administration and its progress so far. Ultimately the “process of change” Evo promised is exactly that: an ongoing and complicated process, yet an important example of development in a globalized world.

Illuminating continuity and change in Supreme Court decisions

Evolving Constitutional Rights: The Roberts Court and Criminal Justice offers a compelling and in-depth analysis of how the U.S. Supreme Court has reshaped constitutional protections under Chief Justice John Roberts. Authors Christopher E. Smith, Michael A. McCall, and Madhavi M. McCall examine the Court’s significant decisions from 2005 to Justice Breyer’s retirement in 2022, revealing a complex judicial landscape where traditional doctrines are revised and fundamental rights are redefined.

The Roberts Court played a decisive role in some of the most contentious issues in American law. Due to several justices’ application of originalist interpretations, its rulings have reconfigured key constitutional protections—often in ways that expand the authority of law enforcement while constraining legislative power over criminal statutes. The trajectory of the Court’s conservative supermajority raises pressing questions about the future of constitutional rights.

Taking a rigorous yet accessible approach, Evolving Constitutional Rights breaks down the Court’s influence across the full spectrum of criminal justice issues, from sentencing and trial rights to search-and-seizure protections, Miranda warnings, and corrections policies. Using both legal and empirical analysis, the authors track patterns in judicial ideology, uncovering how the Roberts Court has not only reinforced conservative principles but also unexpectedly broadened rights in areas such as digital privacy and defense counsel obligations.

This timely and insightful book goes beyond historical rulings to offer a forward-looking perspective on the Supreme Court’s role in shaping public safety, legal precedent, and the balance of power in American government. Essential reading for legal scholars, policymakers, and anyone concerned with the future of constitutional rights, this new volume provides a clear and authoritative examination of the Roberts Court’s lasting impact on American law.

"Excellence for all" might, at first glance, appear to be nothing more than a rhetorical flourish. Who, after all, would oppose the idea of a great education for every student? Yet it is hardly a throwaway phrase. Rather, it represents a surprising fusion of educational policy approaches that had been in tense opposition throughout the twentieth centurythose on the right favoring social efficiency, and those on the left supporting social justice.

This book seeks to understand why the "excellence for all" vision took hold at the time it did, unpacks the particular beliefs and assumptions embedded in it, and details the often informal coalition building that produced this period of consensus. Examining the nation's largest urban school districts (Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York), the author details three major reform efforts in chapters titled "The Right Space: The Small Schools Movement"; "The Right Teachers: Teach for America"; and "The Right Curriculum: Expanding Advanced Placement."

In February 1960, as lunch counter sit-ins began in Southern cities, national attention focused on Nashville, where demonstrations were carried out by an unusually organized and disciplined group of students tutored extensively in nonviolent direct action. Their mentor was Reverend James Lawson Jr., a graduate student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School with longstanding nonviolent credentials. His workshops with Nashville students, exploring Gandhian style philosophies and tactics, had predated the famed Greensboro sit-ins.

As demonstrations continued in Nashville and successive sit-ins saw violence erupt downtown, local Black ministers demanded an audience with Mayor Ben West. At this meeting, an exchange occurred that was misconstrued by subsequent newspaper reportage. Shortly thereafter, Lawson was summarily expelled from Vanderbilt, one semester shy of graduating.

Lawson’s ouster triggered a wave of repercussions and headlines. After extended negotiations with their superiors were rebuffed, a large contingent of Divinity School faculty resigned en masse. Simmering dissension between the university’s professors, Board of Trust, and administrators kept the crisis ongoing. Sustained criticism of Vanderbilt both within the city and nationally made for a turbulent situation as Lawson’s expulsion came to symbolize profound tensions about civil rights and racial justice.

Exploring the role of identitarian politics in the privatization of Newark’s public school system

 

In Expelling Public Schools, John Arena explores the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey—a conflict that is raging in cities across the country—from the vantage point of elites advancing the pro-privatization agenda and their grassroots challengers.

Analyzing the unsuccessful effort of Cory Booker—Newark’s leading pro-privatization activist and mayor—to generate popular support for the agenda, and Booker’s rival and ultimate successor Ras Baraka’s eventual galvanization of the charter movement, Arena argues that Baraka’s black radical politics cloaked a revanchist agenda of privatization.

Expelling Public Schools reveals the political rise of Booker and Baraka, their one-time rivalry and subsequent alliance, and what this particular case study illuminates about contemporary post–civil rights Black politics. Ultimately, Expelling Public Schools is a critique of Black urban regime politics and the way in which antiracist messaging obscures real class divisions, interests, and ideological diversity.

CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC BOOK

A definitive exploration of the ideas, institutions, and principles that shape federal government.

Exploring Federalism is a seminal study by political scientist Daniel J. Elazar that examines the origins, evolution, and enduring significance of federal systems of government. Widely regarded as one of the leading scholars of federalism, Elazar offers a comprehensive analysis of how federal principles have shaped political institutions across diverse societies and historical periods. Rather than limiting his discussion to the United States, he adopts a global and comparative perspective, exploring how federal arrangements provide workable solutions for nations seeking to balance unity with diversity, shared governance with local autonomy, and collective action with individual liberty.

Drawing on history, constitutional theory, and political philosophy, Elazar investigates the covenantal foundations of federalism and explains how federal systems distribute authority, protect regional identities, and promote democratic participation. He also examines contemporary trends toward both centralization and decentralization, arguing that federalism remains one of the most effective frameworks for governing pluralistic societies. Exploring Federalism remains an essential resource for students, scholars, policymakers, and anyone interested in constitutional government and democratic institutions.

Though not all people are religious believers, religion has played important historic roles in developing political systems, parties, and policies—affecting believers and nonbelievers alike. This is particularly true in the United States, where scholars have devoted considerable attention to a variety of political phenomena at the intersection of religious belief and identity, including social movements, voting behavior, public opinion, and public policy. These outcomes are motivated by “identity boundary-making” among the religiously affiliated. The contributors to this volume examine two main factors that influence religious identity: the communication of religious ideas and the perceptions of people (including elites) in communicating said ideas.

Exploring the Public Effects of Religious Communication on Politics examines an array of religious communication phenomena. These include the media’s role in furthering religious narratives about minority groups, religious strategies that interest groups use to advance their appeal, the variable strength of Islamophobia in cross-national contexts, what qualifies as an “evangelical” identity, and clergy representation of religious and institutional teachings. The volume also provides ways for readers to think about developing new insights into the influence religious communication has on political outcomes.