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17 books match the query 'New Politics'

cover of Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers' Rights

Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers' Rights

Daniel J. Galvin

Russell Sage Foundation, 2024

Over the last half century, two major developments have transformed the nature of workers’ rights and altered the pathways available to low-wage workers to combat their exploitation. First, while national labor law, which regulates unionization and collective bargaining, has grown increasingly ineffective, employment laws establishing minimal workplace standards have proliferated at the state and local levels. Second, as labor unions have declined, a diversity of small, under-resourced nonprofit “alt-labor” groups have emerged in locations across the United States to organize and support marginalized workers. In Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights, political scientist Daniel J. Galvin draws on rich data and extensive interviews to examine the links between these developments. With nuance and insight, Galvin explains how alt-labor groups are finding creative ways to help their members while navigating the many organizational challenges and structural constraints they face in this new context.

Alt-labor groups have long offered their members services and organizing opportunities to contest their unfair treatment on the job. But many groups have grown frustrated by the limited impact of these traditional strategies and have turned to public policy to scale up their work. They have successfully led campaigns to combat wage theft, raise the minimum wage, improve working conditions, strengthen immigrants’ rights, and more. These successes present something of a puzzle: relative to their larger, wealthier, and better-connected opponents, alt-labor groups are small, poor, and weak. Their members are primarily low-wage immigrant workers and workers of color who are often socially, economically, and politically marginalized. With few exceptions, the groups lack large dues-paying memberships and are dependent on philanthropic foundations and other unpredictable sources of funding. How, given their myriad challenges, have alt-labor groups managed to make gains for their members?

Galvin reveals that alt-labor groups are leveraging their deep roots in local communities, their unique position in the labor movement, and the flexibility of their organizational forms to build their collective power and extend their reach. A growing number of groups have also become more politically engaged and have set out to alter their political environments by cultivating more engaged citizens, influencing candidate selection processes, and expanding government capacities. These efforts seek to enhance alt-labor groups’ probabilities of success in the near term while incrementally shifting the balance of power over the long term.

Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights comprehensively details alt-labor’s turn to policy and politics, provides compelling insights into the dilemmas the groups now face, and illuminates how their efforts have both invigorated and complicated the American labor movement.
 
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cover of Changing Paths: International Development and the New Politics of Inclusion

Changing Paths

International Development and the New Politics of Inclusion

Peter P. Houtzager and Mick Moore, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2005

After two decades of marketizing, an array of national and international actors have become concerned with growing global inequality, the failure to reduce the numbers of very poor people in the world, and a perceived global backlash against international economic institutions. This new concern with poverty reduction and the political participation of excluded groups has set the stage for a new politics of inclusion within nations and in the international arena. The essays in this volume explore what forms the new politics of inclusion can take in low- and middle-income countries. The contributors favor a polity-centered approach that focuses on the political capacities of social and state actors to negotiate large-scale collective solutions and that highlights various possible strategies to lift large numbers of people out of poverty and political subordination.

The contributors suggest there is little basis for the radical polycentrism that colors so much contemporary development thought. They focus on how the political capabilities of different societal and state actors develop over time and how their development is influenced by state action and a variety of institutional and other factors. The final chapter draws insightful conclusions about the political limitations and opportunities presented by current international discourse on poverty.

Peter P. Houtzager is a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. He has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, visiting lecturer at Stanford University, and lecturer at St. Mary's College. A political scientist with broad training in comparative politics and historical-institutional analysis, he has written extensively on the institutional roots of collective action.

Mick Moore is a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, as well as Director of the Centre for the Future State. He has been a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His professional interests include political and institutional aspects of poverty reduction and of economic policy and performance, the politics and administration of development, and good government.
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cover of Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation

Creating Political Presence

The New Politics of Democratic Representation

Edited by Dario Castiglione and Johannes Pollak

University of Chicago Press, 2018

For at least two centuries, democratic representation has been at the center of debate. Should elected representatives express the views of the majority, or do they have the discretion to interpret their constituents’ interests? How can representatives balance the desires of their parties and their electors? What should be done to strengthen the representation of groups that have been excluded from the political system? Representative democracy itself remains frequently contested, regarded as incapable of reflecting the will of the masses, or inadequate for today’s global governance. Recently, however, this view of democratic representation has been under attack for its failure to capture the performative and constructive elements of the process of representation, and a new literature more attentive to these aspects of the relationship between representatives and the represented has arisen.

In Creating Political Presence, a diverse and international group of scholars explores the implications of such a turn. Two broad, overlapping perspectives emerge. In the first section, the contributions investigate how political representation relates to empowerment, either facilitating or interfering with the capacity of citizens to develop autonomous judgment in collective decision making. Contributions in the second section look at representation from the perspective of inclusion, focusing on how representative relationships and claims articulate the demands of those who are excluded or have no voice. The final section examines political representation from a more systemic perspective, exploring its broader environmental conditions and the way it acquires democratic legitimacy.
 
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cover of Deserving Americans: Partisanship and the New Politics of Social Policy

Deserving Americans

Partisanship and the New Politics of Social Policy

Chris Faricy and Christopher Ellis

University of Chicago Press, 0

A new framework for showing why deservingness politics, more than ideology, has become the central battleground for social policy in a polarized age.

Why do Americans support some government programs but not others? In Deserving Americans, Chris Faricy and Christopher Ellis argue that the answer lies in identity, not ideology. Specifically, support for particular social policies depends on perceptions of whether beneficiaries of government assistance actually deserve the aid that they receive. As partisanship and social identity have converged, partisans increasingly view government aid as a vehicle for rewarding ingroups and punishing outgroups, creating a politics polarized on identity and who government should serve.

Faricy and Ellis show how these dynamics play out across a wide range of policy domains, from antipoverty to health care to family policy and more. Their findings help to clarify many of our current predicaments, yielding insights that explain trends in public opinion and partisan debates over public policy. Deserving Americans offers a powerful new framework for understanding how Americans view social policy—and each other. 

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cover of Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution

Give a Man a Fish

Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution

James Ferguson

Duke University Press, 2015

In Give a Man a Fish James Ferguson examines the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa, in which states make cash payments to their low income citizens. More than thirty percent of South Africa's population receive such payments, even as pundits elsewhere proclaim the neoliberal death of the welfare state. These programs' successes at reducing poverty under conditions of mass unemployment, Ferguson argues, provide an opportunity for rethinking contemporary capitalism and for developing new forms of political mobilization. Interested in an emerging "politics of distribution," Ferguson shows how new demands for direct income payments (including so-called "basic income") require us to reexamine the relation between production and distribution, and to ask new questions about markets, livelihoods, labor, and the future of progressive politics.
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cover of New Politics Of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice

New Politics Of Race

Globalism, Difference, Justice

Howard Winant

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

It isn’t uncommon to hear now that race hardly matters anymore—that we’ve somehow gotten beyond it. In the face of such pronouncements, and the misconceptions that prompt them, this book aims to show precisely why and how race has always been, and remains, absolutely fundamental to modern politics. Howard Winant, one of the leading sociologists of race and ethnicity working today, clearly locates race at the crossroads of identity and social structure, where difference frames inequality and where political processes operate with a comprehensiveness that ranges from the world-historical to the intimately psychological.The New Politics of Race brings together Winant’s new and previously published essays to form a comprehensive picture of the origins and nature of the complex racial politics that engulf us today. It is only in light of the post–World War II patterns of racial insurgency and reform that these politics can be understood, Winant asserts. His work offers a thorough grounding in these patterns, describing the breakdown of a certain racial order after World War II and identifying the ways in which racial hierarchies everywhere are being reestablished and reenergized, often in clandestine, or at least unfamiliar, forms.Theoretically acute and empirically sound, his essays deftly analyze the character of racial formations in a world that is, on the surface, deeply committed to eradicating racism.Howard Winant is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Racial Conditions (Minnesota, 1994) and The World Is a Ghetto, and the coauthor with Michael Omi of Racial Formation in the United States.
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cover of Of Red Dragons and Evil Spirits: Post-Communist Historiography between Democratization and the New Politics of History

Of Red Dragons and Evil Spirits

Post-Communist Historiography between Democratization and the New Politics of History

Oto Luthar

Central European University Press, 2017

The collection of well-researched essays assesses the uses and misuses of history 25 years after the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. As opposed to the revival of national histories that seemed to be the prevailing historiographical approach of the 1990s, the last decade has seen a particular set of narratives equating Nazism and Communism. This provides opportunities to exonerate wartime collaboration, casting the nation as victim even when its government was allied with Germany. While the Jewish Holocaust is acknowledged, its meaning and significance are obfuscated. In their comparative analysis the authors are also interested in new practices of ‘Europeanness’. Therefore their presentations of Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and Slovenian post-communist memory politics move beyond the common national myths in order to provide a new insight into transnational interactions and exchanges in Europe in general. The juxtaposition of these politics, the processes in other parts of Europe, the modes of remembering shaped by displacement and the transnational enable a close encounter with the divergences and assess the potential of the formation of common, European memory practices.
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cover of Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy

Power Shift

Keywords for a New Politics of Energy

Imre Szeman

West Virginia University Press, 2025

Power Shift traces recent social and cultural shifts in how we understand and imagine energy, the environment, and the challenges of global warming. Across the globe, the need to transition to renewables has become the guiding reality of our energy present and future, despite continuing resistance to change. But what does this moment of energy transition look like for those struggling to make it happen in a way that benefits every individual and all communities?

Featuring brief essays on 101 key terms by scholars, artists, and activists from around the world and across disciplines, Power Shift offers an expansive, kaleidoscopic guide to the history of petromodernity, recent technological and social developments, and pathways to new energy futures. The book offers new insights into the emergent politics of energy, contrasting today’s environmental and climate movements with the geopolitical contests of the Cold War era. It explores the still unfolding story of energy transition by focusing on the ongoing struggles of communities and individuals against decisions made by corporations, governments, and international organizations.
 
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cover of The New Politics of Beijing–Hong Kong Relations: Ideological Conflicts and Factionalism

The New Politics of Beijing–Hong Kong Relations

Ideological Conflicts and Factionalism

Sonny Shiu-Hing Lo

Hong Kong University Press, 2024

Examines the changing ideologies and conflicts between Hong Kong and the mainland from 2012 to the present.

The New Politics of Beijing–Hong Kong Relations particularly examines the paternalistic authoritarianism that can be seen in Beijing's policy toward Hong Kong since the promulgation of the national security law in late June 2020. Lo analyzes the ideological shift from liberal nationalism to conservative nationalism on the mainland Chinese side since late 2012. The increasingly radical localism on the Hong Kong side after 2014 altered Beijing-Hong Kong relations and introduced factional struggles. While the imposition of the national security law in Hong Kong in late June 2020 has stabilized the city politically, Beijing's policy toward Hong Kong is now guided by the principles of protecting its national security and maintaining economic pragmatism, with implications for Beijing's relations with Taipei in the coming years.
 
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cover of The New Politics of Indian Gaming: The Rise of Reservation Interest Groups

The New Politics of Indian Gaming

The Rise of Reservation Interest Groups

Kenneth N. Hansen

University of Nevada Press, 2015

The advent of gaming on Indian reservations has created a new kind of tribal politics over the past three decades. Now armed with often substantial financial resources, Indigenous peoples have adjusted their political strategies from a focus on the judicial system and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to one that directly lobbies state and federal governments and non-Indigenous voters. These tactics allow tribes to play an influential role in shaping state and national policies that affect their particular interests. Using case studies of major Indian gaming states, the contributing authors analyze the interplay of tribal governance, state politics, and federalism, and illustrate the emergence of reservation governments as political power brokers.
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cover of The New Politics of Online Feminism

The New Politics of Online Feminism

Akane Kanai

Duke University Press, 2026

In The New Politics of Online Feminism, Akane Kanai argues that for young feminists online culture often poses more dilemmas than it solves. Moving beyond a narrow characterization of online feminism as a site of activism and resistance, Kanai attends to the feminist quandaries of being politically conscientious as life online becomes inseparable from the offline world. Kanai suggests that for online feminists, avoiding complicity with patriarchy, racism, and other oppressions has never been more important, yet the self has remained the central site of agency and transformation—casting politics in terms of individual scrupulousness, diligence, and improvement. Under these circumstances, a feminist lens becomes about benchmarking, comparing, and anxiously avoiding the public mistakes that others make in online life. Kanai foregrounds the importance of moving beyond the polarities of correct and incorrect feeling to enable the everyday practices of listening to and learning about experience and difference.
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cover of The New Politics of Pornography

The New Politics of Pornography

Donald Alexander Downs

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Fresh empirical evidence of pornography's negative effects and the resurgence of feminist and conservative critiques have caused local, state, and federal officials to reassess the pornography issue. In The New Politics of Pornography, Donald Alexander Downs explores the contemporary antipornography movement and addresses difficult questions about the limits of free speech. Drawing on official transcripts and extensive interviews, Downs recreates and analyzes landmark cases in Minneapolis and Indianapolis. He argues persuasively that both conservative and liberal camps are often characterized by extreme intolerance which hampers open policy debate and may ultimately threaten our modern doctrine of free speech. Downs concludes with a balanced and nuanced discussion of what First Amendment protections pornography should be afforded. This provocative and interdisciplinary work will interest students of political science, women's studies, civil liberties, and constitutional law.
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cover of The New Politics of Protest: Indigenous Mobilization in Latin America's Neoliberal Era

The New Politics of Protest

Indigenous Mobilization in Latin America's Neoliberal Era

Roberta Rice

University of Arizona Press, 2012

In June 1990, Ecuador saw the first major indigenous rebellion within its borders since the colonial era.  For weeks, indigenous protesters participated in marches, staged demonstrations, seized government offices, and blockaded roads. Since this insurrection, indigenous movements have become increasingly important in the fight against Latin American Neoliberalism.

Roberta Rice's New Politics of Protest seeks to analyze when, where, and why indigenous protests against free-market reforms have occurred in Latin America. Comparing cases in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, this book details the emergence of indigenous movements under and against Neoliberal governments. Rice uses original field research and interviews with indigenous leaders to examine long-term patterns of indigenous political activism and overturn accepted theories on the role of the Indian in democracy. 

A useful and engaging study, The New Politics of Protest seeks to determine when indigenous movements become viable political parties. It covers the most recent rounds of protest to demonstrate how a weak and unresponsive government is more likely to experience revolts against unpopular reforms. This influential work will be of interest to scholars of Latin American politics and indigenous studies as well as anyone studying oppressed peoples who have organized nationwide strikes and protests, blocked economic reforms, toppled corrupt leaders, and even captured presidencies.
 

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cover of The New Politics of Science

The New Politics of Science

David Dickson

University of Chicago Press, 1988

How science "gets done" in today's world has profound political repercussions, since scientific knowledge, through its technical applications, has become an important source of both economic and military power. The increasing dependence of scientific research on funding from business and the military has made questions about the access to and control of scientific knowledge a central issue in today's politics of science.

In The New Politics of Science, David Dickson points out that "the scientific community has its own internal power structures, its elites, its hierarchies, its ideologies, its sanctioned norms of social behavior, and its dissenting groups. And the more that science, as a social practice, forms an integral part of the economic structures of the society in which it is imbedded, the more the boundaries and differences between the two dissolve. Groups inside the scientific community, for example, will use groups outside the community—and vice versa—to achieve their own political ends." In this edition, Dickson has included a new preface commenting on the continuing and increasing influence of industrial and defense interests on American scientific research in the 1980s.
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cover of The New Politics of Visibility: Spaces, Actors, Practices and Technologies in the Visible

The New Politics of Visibility

Spaces, Actors, Practices and Technologies in the Visible

Edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti

Intellect Books, 2022

Nine interdisciplinary essays employ, explore, and critique the analytical category and the practical stakes of visibility.

Not only does visibility matter to politics, but it is an increasingly intrinsic constituent element and a crucial asset of it. Accordingly, the challenge to social science is that of understanding how the new institutional, urban, and technological settings are reshaping the organization of the visible.

Ranging from urban public space to the new media and social media platforms, a team of distinguished scholars and researchers here addresses a vast terrain of inquiry by joining together original theoretical elaboration with careful empirical studies. The result is a thoroughly interdisciplinary endeavor, conducted with passion and insight. The New Politics of Visibility comprises nine original interdisciplinary chapters that analyze topical areas in the newly emerging modes of governance and society. The transformations of urban space and the working of new media form a core concern recurring through many of the essays but is by no means the sole topic, as other essays address the politics of visibility in crucial cultural spheres, including gender relations and professional life.
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cover of W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender

W Stands for Women

How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender

Michaele L. Ferguson and Lori J. Marso, eds.

Duke University Press, 2007

Taking seriously the “W Stands for Women” rhetoric of the 2004 Bush–Cheney campaign, the contributors to this collection investigate how “W” stands for women. They argue that George W. Bush has hijacked feminist language toward decidedly antifeminist ends; his use of feminist rhetoric is deeply and problematically connected to a conservative gender ideology. While it is not surprising that conservative views about gender motivate Bush’s stance on so-called “women’s issues” such as abortion, what is surprising—and what this collection demonstrates—is that a conservative gender ideology also underlies a range of policies that do not appear explicitly related to gender, most notably foreign and domestic policies associated with the post-9/11 security state. Any assessment of the lasting consequences of the Bush presidency requires an understanding of the gender conservatism at its core.

In W Stands for Women ten feminist scholars analyze various aspects of Bush’s persona, language, and policy to show how his administration has shaped a new politics of gender. One contributor points out the shortcomings of “compassionate conservatism,” a political philosophy that requires a weaker class to be the subject of compassion. Another examines Lynndie England’s participation in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in relation to the interrogation practices elaborated in the Army Field Manual, practices that often entail “feminizing” detainees by stripping them of their masculine gender identities. Whether investigating the ways that Bush himself performs masculinity or the problems with discourse that positions non-Western women as supplicants in need of saving, these essays highlight the far-reaching consequences of the Bush administration’s conflation of feminist rhetoric, conservative gender ideology, and neoconservative national security policy.

Contributors. Andrew Feffer, Michaele L. Ferguson, David S. Gutterman, Mary Hawkesworth, Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, Lori Jo Marso, Danielle Regan, R. Claire Snyder, Iris Marion Young, Karen Zivi

Michaela Ferguson and Karen Zivi appeared on KPFA’s Against the Grain on September 11, 2007. Listen to the audio.
Michaela Ferguson and Lori Jo Marso appeared on WUNC’s The State of Things on August 30, 2007. Listen to the audio.

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cover of Wisconsin Watershed: Tony Earl and the New Politics of the Democratic Party

Wisconsin Watershed

Tony Earl and the New Politics of the Democratic Party

Dave Cieslewicz

Michigan State University Press, 2027

In 1982, Tony Earl stormed into the Wisconsin governorship with a sweeping victory, rallying blue-collar Democrats around a progressive political platform. Four years later, observers were stunned when he was soundly defeated by conservative Republican Tommy Thompson—not because of any failure as governor, but because, as Dave Cieslewicz notes, the Democratic Party and American politics had undergone a dramatic transformation.

Wisconsin Watershed traces Earl’s journey from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the U.S. Navy, through his years in Wisconsin politics and his single, controversial term as Wisconsin’s governor. Earl tackled acid rain, comparable worth, AIDS policy, and tax reform with equal force; he kept American Motors in the state and pulled Wisconsin from a fiscal crisis. Yet voters could not connect his name with his accomplishments. The progressivism that energized new constituencies also alienated the working-class Catholics who had formed the Democratic Party’s backbone. “It’s not the taxes,” one legislator explained. “It’s the desks”—the name for Earl’s symbolic offices to advocate for Native Americans, African Americans, and women.

Earl refused negative campaigning, and he believed that good policy would ultimately prove good politics. His defeat marked the beginning of the end of an era of civility. Through Earl’s story, we witness the Democratic Party’s evolution from New Deal coalition to the emergence of a modern campaign culture that values image and anger over good governance.

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