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We have politics on our mind—or, rather, we have politics in different parts of our brains. In this path-breaking study, Matt Qvortrup takes the reader on a whistle stop tour through the fascinating, and sometimes frightening, world of neuropolitics; the discipline that combines neuroscience and politics, and is even being used to win elections.

Putting the 'science' back into political science, The Political Brain shows how fMRI-scans can identify differences between Liberals and Conservatives, can predict our behaviour with sometimes greater accuracy than surveys, and can explain the biology of uprisings, revolutions, and wars.

Not merely a study of empirical evidence, the book shows how the philosophical theories of, among others, Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza can be supported by brain scans. Along the way, it also provides an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge of the organ that shapes our politics. The book shows that if we rely on evolutionary primitive parts of the midbrain—those engaged when we succumb to polarised politics—we stand in danger of squandering the gains we made through the last eight million years.

Centrists reject each of these fragmented and polarized approaches to politics. We believe that government has a role to play in structuring social and economic opportunities and in reinforcing basic moral norms, yet we are deeply troubled by ever-expanding government. We reject libertarianism, left-liberalism, and the various schools of conservatism as a model for government.

Part I of The Political Centrist briefly traces the trajectory of the liberal and conservative traditions. It argues that modern liberalism is an unprincipled fusion of classical liberal and socialist ideals while modern conservatism is an untenable hybrid of economic liberalism and social conservatism. Part II offers a centrist approach to many of the most contentious contemporary political and social issues. Those include:

-- abortion


-- affirmative action


-- the death penalty


-- gay marriage


-- illegal immigration


-- judicial activism


-- the relationship of religion and politics


-- the role of government in the economy

From civically and politically engaged women linking their identity as “mothers” to their fight for prohibition, public sanitation, and protective labor laws to the general call to arms of “mama grizzlies” issued by Sarah Palin in 2010, American political activists and candidates have used motherhood to rally women’s interest, support, and participation throughout American history. Politicized motherhood persists, and motherhood continues to inspire women’s participation and direct their concerns.

In The Political Consequences of Motherhood, Jill S. Greenlee investigates the complex relationship between motherhood and women’s political attitudes. Combining a historical overview of the ways motherhood has been used for political purposes with recent political opinion surveys and individual-level analysis, she explains how and when motherhood shapes women’s thoughts and preferences. Greenlee argues that two mechanisms account for the durability of motherhood politics. First, women experience attitudinal shifts when they become mothers. Second, “mother” is a broad-based identity, widely shared and ideologically unconstrained, that lends itself to appeals across the political spectrum to build support for candidates and policy issues.

A political history of the rise and fall of American debt relief.

Americans have a long history with debt. They also have a long history of mobilizing for debt relief. Throughout the nineteenth century, indebted citizens demanded government protection from their financial burdens, challenging readings of the Constitution that exalted property rights at the expense of the vulnerable. Their appeals shaped the country’s periodic experiments with state debt relief and federal bankruptcy law, constituting a pre-industrial safety net. Yet, the twentieth century saw the erosion of debtor politics and the eventual retrenchment of bankruptcy protections.

The Political Development of American Debt Relief traces how geographic, sectoral, and racial politics shaped debtor activism over time, enhancing our understanding of state-building, constitutionalism, and social policy.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

A political history of the rise and fall of American debt relief.

Americans have a long history with debt. They also have a long history of mobilizing for debt relief. Throughout the nineteenth century, indebted citizens demanded government protection from their financial burdens, challenging readings of the Constitution that exalted property rights at the expense of the vulnerable. Their appeals shaped the country’s periodic experiments with state debt relief and federal bankruptcy law, constituting a pre-industrial safety net. Yet, the twentieth century saw the erosion of debtor politics and the eventual retrenchment of bankruptcy protections.

The Political Development of American Debt Relief traces how geographic, sectoral, and racial politics shaped debtor activism over time, enhancing our understanding of state-building, constitutionalism, and social policy.

An authoritative look at how artificial intelligence both shapes and is shaped by the political and economic forces of the modern world.

As the effects of artificial intelligence are felt across economies and societies, many of its ramifications are still emerging. This volume brings together economists and political scientists to examine how AI intersects with regulation, military power, and political identity—offering analytical frameworks and identifying key open questions for future research.

The contributions address topics such as the allocation of property rights for AI inputs, trade-offs among alternative regulatory regimes, and the role of interest groups in shaping the technology’s trajectory. They explore how AI-related capabilities influence military effectiveness, resource allocation, and bargaining power among nations, and consider AI’s effects on political preferences, from the influence of AI-curated information on polarization to the implications of targeted political advertising and personalized education for national identity formation. The volume highlights key trade-offs that arise in AI’s political economy, and points toward empirical strategies and theoretical models that can advance understanding in this emerging field.

Drawing on diverse disciplinary perspectives, the collection provides a foundation for rigorous inquiry into how AI both shapes and is shaped by political and economic forces.

The transition from authoritarian to democratic government in Brazil unleashed profound changes in government and society that cannot be adequately understood from any single theoretical perspective. The great need, say Graham and Wilson, is a holistic vision of what occurred in Brazil, one that opens political and economic analysis to new vistas. This need is answered in The Political Economy of Brazil, a groundbreaking study of late twentieth-century Brazilian issues from a policy perspective.

The book was an outgrowth of a year-long policy research project undertaken jointly by the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, both at the University of Texas at Austin. In this book, several noted scholars focus on specific issues central to an understanding of the political and economic choices that were under debate in Brazil. Their findings reveal that for Brazil the break with the past—the authoritarian regime—could not be complete due to economic choices made in the 1960s and 1970s, and also the way in which economic resources committed at that time locked the government into a relatively limited number of options in balancing external and internal pressures.

These conclusions will be important for everyone working in Latin American and Third World development.

Any student, academic or practitioner wanting to succeed in development studies, radical or mainstream, must understand the World Bank's role and the evolution of its thinking and activities. The Political Economy of Development provides tools for gaining this understanding and applies them across a range of topics.

The research, practice and scholarship of development are always set against the backdrop of the World Bank, whose formidable presence shapes both development practice and thinking. This book brings together academics that specialise in different subject areas of development and reviews their findings in the context of the World Bank as knowledge bank, policy-maker and financial institution. The volume offers a compelling contribution to our understanding of development studies and of development itself.

The Political Economy of Development is an invaluable critical resource for students, policy-makers and activists in development studies.

The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967 has many important economic aspects that are often overlooked. In this highly original book, Shir Hever shows that understanding the economic dimensions of the occupation is crucial to unravelling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Hever rejects the premise that Israel keeps control over Palestinian territories for material gain, and also the premise that Israel is merely defending itself from Palestinian aggression. Instead, he argues that the occupation has reached an impasse, with the Palestinian resistance making exploitation of the Palestinians by Israeli business interests difficult, but the Israeli authorities reluctant to give up control.

With traditional economic analysis failing to explain this turn of events, this book will be invaluable for students, activists and journalists struggling to make sense of the complex issues surrounding Israel's occupation.

The historic and increasing interdependence of the Latin American and U.S. economies makes an understanding of the political economies of Latin American nations particularly timely and important. After World War II, many nations initially implemented import substituting industrialization policies. Their outcomes, and the shift in policies, are related to the domestic policies and world economic conditions that led to government deficits, inflation, foreign borrowing, debt renegotiation, and renewed emphasis on common markets and other devices to stimulate trade and investment.

In The Political Economy of Latin America in the Postwar Period, important policy measures are evaluated, such as indexation of prices and contracts; special provisions for financing the government through the Central Bank; stabilization; and deregulation of the economy.

The introduction presents trends in Latin American growth and the factors that influence them. This is followed by parallel studies of the economic development of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru from 1945 to the mid-1990s. Noted experts bring their considerable experience to analyzing the content and impact of the economic theories that guided policymaking and their effects on output, income, and quality of life.

Jude L. Fernando explores the paradoxical relationship between NGOs and capitalism, showing that supposedly progressive organisations often promote essentially the same policies and ideas as existing governments.

The book examines how a diverse group of NGOs have shaped state formation in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It argues that, rather than influencing state formation for the better, NGOs have been integrated into the capitalist system and their language adopted to give traditional exploitative social relations a transformative appearance.

This enlightening study will give pause to those who see NGOs as drivers of true social change and will encourage students of development studies to make a deeper analysis of state formation.

Despite gloomy prophecies, democracy and the market economy seem to be taking root throughout Central and Eastern Europe, although set against a background of a recession deeper and longer than that of the Great Depression. How is this possible? Why did Eastern Europeans protest less about the brutal social consequences of systemic change than the people of Latin America a decade earlier? Why has the region-wide authoritarian or populist turnabout not occurred? Why has democracy in these countries proved to be crisis-proof? In what ways has economic crisis impacted on the politics of the region?

In addressing these questions, Béla Greskovits uses a comparative analysis of the structures, institutions, cultures, and actors shaping both the Eastern European and the Latin American transformations. He argues that structural, institutional, and cultural factors have put a brake on destabilizing collective actions and have paved the way for the emergence of the enduring, low-level equilibrium between incomplete democracy and imperfect market economy which seems set to characterize the Central and Eastern European experience for the foreseeable future.

In this first overview of the Brazilian republican state based on extensive primary source material, Steven Topik demonstrates that well before the disruption of the export economy in 1929, the Brazilian state was one of the most interventionist in Latin America. This study counters the previous general belief that before 1930 Brazil was dominated by an export oligarchy comprised of European and North American capitalists and that only later did the state become prominent in the country’s economic development.

Topik examines the state’s performance during the First Republic (1889–1930) in four sectors—finance, the coffee trade, railroads, and industry. By looking at the controversies in these areas, he explains how domestic interclass and international struggles shaped policy and notes the degree to which the state acted relatively independently of civil society.

Topik’s primary concern is the actions of state officials and whether their decisions reflected the demands of the ruling class. He shows that conflicting interests of fractions of the ruling class and foreign investors gradually led to far greater state participation than any of the participants originally desired, and that the structure of the economy and of society—not the intentions of the actors—best explains the state’s economic presence.

Are the Mexican people the children of Moctezuma or the children of Cortés? This question, long the central problem of Mexican historians, Justo Sierra answered by saying, "The Mexicans are the sons of the two peoples, of the two races … to this we owe our soul."

Because Sierra recognized the dual parentage, he was able to view his country's history as an evolutionary process. Formed in both the indigenous past and the colonial past, the Mexican people, after three hundred years of slow and painful gestation, were finally born with the arrival of Independence. They came of age when the Reform, the Republic, and the nation achieved a single identity.

This classical synthesis, written on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, gave direction to the generation that furnished the Revolution's intellectual leaders. Although the author was Secretary of Public Instruction in the dictatorial regime of Porfirio Díaz, he was the first historian to show sympathy for the plight of the masses, and his book ends with the warning that political evolution has lost its way unless the result is freedom.

As Edmundo O'Gorman points out in an important essay on Mexican historiography, written especially for this edition, Sierra was also the first to write a history of his nation in a sincere endeavor to get at the truth, instead of shaping his account to prove a thesis or to preach some political faith. And yet, his work "owes its originality and its lasting merit to his vigorous interpretation of Mexico's history in the light of his convictions, of his keen insight, even of his fears." Though the chapters on the pre-Columbian Indian have been rendered obsolete by later archeological discoveries, the rest of the history is still valid and needs only to be brought up to date.

A searing study of how modern reproductive politics shapes women's bodily agency

Pregnancy indisputably takes place within a woman's body. But as reproductive power finds its way into the hands of medical professionals, lobbyists, and policymakers, the geographies of pregnancy are shifting, and the boundaries need to be redrawn, argues Laura R. Woliver. The Political Geographies of Pregnancy is a vigorous analysis of the ways modern reproductive politics are shaped by long-standing debates on abortion and adoption, surrogacy arrangements, new reproductive technologies, medical surveillance, and the mapping of the human genome.

Across a politically charged backdrop of reproductive issues, Woliver exposes strategies that claim to uphold the best interests of children, families, and women but in reality complicate women's struggles to have control over their own bodies. Utilizing feminist standpoint theory and promoting a feminist ethic of care, Woliver looks at abortion politics, modern adoption laws that cater to male-headed families, regulations that allow the state to monitor pregnant women but not always provide care for them, and the power structures behind the seemingly benign world of egg-selling and surrogate parenting. She also considers the potentially staggering political implications of mapping the human genome, and the exclusion of women's perspectives in discussions about legislation and advancements in reproductive technologies.

Exploring who benefits and who pays when different narratives are accepted as true, Pride offers a step-by-step account of how Mobile's culture changed each time a new and more forceful narrative was used to justify inequality. More than a retelling of Mobile's story of desegregation, The Political Use of Racial Narratives promotes the value of rhetorical and narrative analysis in the social sciences and history.

A qualified defense of authenticity claims in contemporary politics.

On both the Left and Right, we see a range of political claims cast in terms of authenticity, from transgender persons seeking recognition of who they truly are to religious business owners requesting exemptions from antidiscrimination laws. For claimants, what is often at stake is an inner self that would be harmed if changed or concealed. At the same time, many scholars are skeptical of authenticity claims, with some worrying that they are too nebulous and inward-looking and others fearing that they contain too much anti-democratic potential. There is also the added difficulty of determining when and on what grounds to accept a claim of authenticity.

Nina Hagel argues that while invoking authenticity has serious risks, it remains a crucial democratic resource. Through an engagement with canonical and contemporary political theorists, and an analysis of current political struggles centering on authenticity, Hagel advances a defense of authenticity’s democratic potential, alongside a practice for interpreting and invoking such claims. While one might assume that this perspective clashes with the post-modern view that there is no true self outside of politics and history, Hagel puts forward a non-essentialist understanding of authenticity that emphasizes subject formation and emancipation. Hagel argues that authenticity claims best support democracy when they collectively steward, rather than overcome, the social powers that shape our identities. We ignore authenticity claims at our peril, since the objects of such claims are the norms and practices that make us who we are.

2026 APSA Jeffrey Friedman Best Book on Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics Award Winner

The Politics of Beginning traces the formation of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), now the most authoritative private organization for forestry certification. It starts with recounting the highly politicized forest politics of the late 1980s, when activists protested human rights abuses and deforestation while experimenting with sustainable forestry practices. The book then follows the people who became the founding members of the Forest Stewardship Council. By using live audio recordings of the FSC founding assembly in 1993, this book provides an in-depth analysis of a constitutional moment for private authority in world politics.

To explore how timber merchants, Indigenous communities, and social and environmental NGOs engaged in private institution-making, Alejandro Esguerra works with the concept of translation developed in Actor-Network Theory—a process in which knowledge about governance is continuously recontextualized—and introduces it to International Relations theory. He develops a dramaturgical methodology with metaphors of theatre such as stage, script, and performance. This methodology can be used to analyze the ways in which activists and others translate knowledge about governance and the practices of inclusion and exclusion that appear during this process. The environmental crisis requires a transformation in the ways societies value and govern human–nature relations, and The Politics of Beginning reveals the conditions under which even formerly antagonistic actors start developing a common political project.