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The election of populist politicians in recent years seems to challenge the commitment to democracy, if not its ideal. This book argues that majority rule is not the problem; rather, the institutions that stabilize majorities are responsible for the suppression of minority interests. Despite the popular notion that social choice instability (or “cycling”) makes it impossible for majorities to make sound legislation, Yuhui Li argues that the best part of democracy is not the large number of people on the winning side; it is that the winners can be easily divided and realigned with the losers in the cycling process. He shows that minorities’ bargaining power depends on their ability to exploit division within the winning coalition and induce its members to defect, an institutionalized uncertainty that is missing in one-party authoritarian systems.

Dividing the Rulers theorizes why such division within the majority is important and what kind of institutional features can help a democratic system maintain such division, which is crucial in preventing the “tyranny of the majority.” These institutional solutions point to a direction of institutional reform that academics, politicians, and voters should collectively pursue.
 

Winner of the Social Science History Association President’s Book Award

East Germany was the first domino to fall when the Soviet bloc began to collapse in 1989. Its topple was so swift and unusual that it caught many area specialists and social scientists off guard; they failed to recognize the instability of the Communist regime, much less its fatal vulnerability to popular revolt. In this volume, Steven Pfaff identifies the central mechanisms that propelled the extraordinary and surprisingly bloodless revolution within the German Democratic Republic (GDR). By developing a theory of how exit-voice dynamics affect collective action, Pfaff illuminates the processes that spurred mass demonstrations in the GDR, led to a peaceful surrender of power by the hard-line Leninist elite, and hastened German reunification. While most social scientific explanations of collective action posit that the option for citizens to emigrate—or exit—suppresses the organized voice of collective public protest by providing a lower-cost alternative to resistance, Pfaff argues that a different dynamic unfolded in East Germany. The mass exit of many citizens provided a focal point for protesters, igniting the insurgent voice of the revolution.

Pfaff mines state and party records, police reports, samizdat, Church documents, and dissident manifestoes for his in-depth analysis not only of the genesis of local protest but also of the broader patterns of exit and voice across the entire GDR. Throughout his inquiry, Pfaff compares the East German rebellion with events occurring during the same period in other communist states, particularly Czechoslovakia, China, Poland, and Hungary. He suggests that a trigger from outside the political system—such as exit—is necessary to initiate popular mobilization against regimes with tightly centralized power and coercive surveillance.

The line is drawn in cities of the American West: on one side, chambers of commerce, developers, and civic boosters advocating economic growth; on the other, environmentalists and concerned citizens who want to limit what they see as urban sprawl. While this conflict is usually considered to have its origins in the rise of environmental activism during the late 1960s, opposition to urban growth in the Southwest began as early as the economic boom that followed World War II. Evidence of this resistance abounds, but it has been largely ignored by both western and urban historians.

Fighting Sprawl and City Hall now sets the record straight, tracing the roots of antigrowth activism in two southwestern cities, Tucson and Albuquerque, where urbanization proceeded in the face of constant protest. Logan tells how each of these cities witnessed multifaceted opposition to post-war urbanization and a rise in political activism during the 1950s. For each city, he describes the efforts by civic boosters and local government to promote development, showing how these booster-government alliances differed in effectiveness; tells how middle-class Anglos first voiced opposition to annexations and zoning reforms through standard forms of political protest such as referendums and petitions; then documents the shift to ethnic resistance as Hispanics opposed urban renewal plans that targeted barrios. Environmentalism, he reveals, was a relative latecomer to the political arena and became a focal point for otherwise disparate forms of resistance.

Logan's study enables readers to understand not only these similarities in urban activism but also important differences; for example, Tucson provides the stronger example of resistance based on valuation of the physical environment, while Albuquerque better demonstrates anti-annexation politics. For each locale, it offers a testament to grass-roots activism that will be of interest to historians as well as to citizens of its subject cities.

Forty years ago, viewers who wanted to watch the news could only choose from among the major broadcast networks, all of which presented the same news without any particular point of view. Today we have a much broader array of choices, including cable channels offering a partisan take. With partisan programs gaining in popularity, some argue that they are polarizing American politics, while others counter that only a tiny portion of the population watches such programs and that their viewers tend to already hold similar beliefs.

           
In How Partisan Media Polarize America, Matthew Levendusky confirms—but also qualifies—both of these claims. Drawing on experiments and survey data, he shows that Americans who watch partisan programming do become more certain of their beliefs and less willing to weigh the merits of opposing views or to compromise. And while only a small segment of the American population watches partisan media programs, those who do tend to be more politically engaged, and their effects on national politics are therefore far-reaching.

           
In a time when politics seem doomed to partisan discord, How Partisan Media Polarize America offers a much-needed clarification of the role partisan media might play.

Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent was first published in 1995. 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.

Once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the people of East Germany had little use for the dissident intellectuals who had helped bring it down. Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent offers a penetrating look into the circumstances of this fall from grace, unique among the former Communist states.

John Torpey traces the dissident intellectuals' fate to the peculiar situation of the East German regime, which sought to build "socialism in a quarter of a country" on the anti-fascist foundations of Communist opposition to Nazism. He shows how the regime's unusual history and subnational status helped sustain the East German intelligentsia's conviction that socialism could be reformed and humane-that there was a "third way" between Soviet-style socialism and the capitalism that took root in West Germany. How the pursuit of this third way both supported and undermined the regime, and both galvanized and alienated the East German people, becomes clear in Torpey's nuanced analysis. His book makes a powerful contribution to our understanding of the politics of intellectuals during one of the most painful chapters in modern German history.

John C. Torpey is currently a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.

This study of the influence minority parties wield is both a major work of political science scholarship and a timely examination of an issue with real consequences for the functioning of democratic legislatures and the creation of legislation.

Challenging conventional assumptions that the majority party dominates the legislature, Jennifer Hayes Clark investigates precisely the ways in which—and under what conditions—members of the minority party successfully pursue their interests. For this study, Clark collects fine-grained data from both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures to get a close look at three key points in the legislative process: committee assignments, bill cosponsorship, and roll-call votes. She finds that minority party members are not systematically excluded throughout the policymaking process. Indeed, their capacity to shape legislative decision-making is enhanced when party polarization is low, when institutional prerogatives are broadly dispersed rather than centralized, and when staff resources are limited. Under these conditions, bipartisanship bill cosponsorship and voting coalitions are also more prevalent.

With the sharp increase of partisan polarization in state legislatures and in Congress, it is essential to understand how and when a minority party can effectively represent constituents.