New Books in Politics

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Virginia Gray, David Lowery, and Jennifer Benz are the authors of Interest Group$ and Health Care Reform Across the United State$ (Georgetown University Press, 2013). Gray is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, UNC, Chapel Hill, Lowery is Professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University, and Jennifer Benz is a Senior Researcher at NORC at the University of Chicago. In the wake of the passage of national health care reform (Affordable Care Act (ACA)), we may all have overlooked the plethora of policy making at the state level. Why is it that the ACA took over 50 years to pass, yet states have regularly changed their own health care regulations? This book investigates how state policy makers have reformed health care laws from 1988-2002 with a focus on: market controls; mandated employee coverage; coverage for needy families; and single-payer systems. As the title suggests, they pay particular attention to the role interest groups have played in reform. The authors end the book with a discussion of the implementation of the ACA by states.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Vanessa Williamson is coauthor (with Theda Skocpol) of The Tea Party: Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 2012), a New Yorker magazine “Ten Best Political Books of 2012″). Williamson is a Ph.D. student at Harvard University and Skocpol is professor of government and sociology at Harvard University. A lot has been written about the Tea Party, much from journalists and commentators. Williamson and Skocpol add a welcome scholarly vantage point, but don’t rest on the distance many academic prefer. They travel the country, interviewing Tea Party advocates, attending Tea Party gatherings in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Arizona. They also mine traditional social science sources of information as well. What results is a nuanced portrait of a very complex modern political phenomenon. The Tea Party, according to Williamson and Skocpol, is in part the result of grassroots activism, part top-down policy entrepreneurship, and part modern media promotion. This book unearths many of the institutional dimensions of the Tea Party movement that help explain how it grew so quickly – 1,000 Tea Party groups formed in just the initial period – and grew so powerful – millions of dollars coalesced to help fund, train, and mobilize supporters and candidates. The electoral successes in the 2010 elections and subsequent policy victories in state tax, budget, and voting policy are the most obvious legacy to date.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Big Ideas] In the “Great Recession,” millions lost their jobs, retirement savings, and even their houses. The entire middle class was shaken. Yet almost no one has been brought to justice. Quite the opposite: the big banks and investment houses–the places where the perpetrators most likely work and worked–were bailed out by the federal government under the banner of being “too big to fail.” Perhaps it’s the case that we will never know enough about what happened to indict anyone, or at least anyone in the upper reaches of the financial industry. But does that mean we don’t, in a general way, know who was responsible? Not according to Hedrick Smith. In his new book Who Stole the American Dream? (Random House, 2012), the veteran reporter digs deep into American political and economic history to find out who we should blame for this colossal economic meltdown. What he found is surprising. The roots of the crisis go back farther than most people–experts included–think. Sure the bankers were involved, but so were politicians (including, of all people Jimmy Carter)–a lot of them. According to Smith, there’s plenty of blame to go around, at least in corporate boardrooms and the corridors of power in Washington.

[Cross-posted from New Books in American Studies] Why is it that the United States continues to enforce the death penalty when the rest of the Western world abolished its use a little over three decades ago? That question, along with many other equally important questions, is at the heart of Dr. David Garland’s recent book Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Harvard University Press, 2010). His provocative study highlights the uneven application of capital punishment America––a phenomenon widely discussed but rarely understood––and offers a succinct and thoughtful analysis of the historical roots of this contemporary problem. Comparing the modern form of state execution (lethal injection) with original, brutal, forms of state execution (pressing, dismemberment, burning, beheading), Garland dissects the sociocultural and political uses of capital punishment and how they changed over the centuries, evolving to meet the needs of a modern liberal democracy. These liberal adaptations, as Garland explains, forced executions from the public gallows into private rooms within prisons, created a mandatory legal procedure of “super due-process,” and sought to diminish cruel and unusual bodily harm to the offender. But have these adaptations nullified its original purposes? For instance, various studies have shown that the death penalty does not act a deterrent to criminals or serve retributive purposes to the victims and their families. Given these facts, what purposes does it serve, if any? Do these reasons justify retention of the practice? Listen in for more! Dr. Garland is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University. Peculiar Institution is the recipient of numerous awards including: 2012 Michael J. Hindelang Award (American Society of Criminology), 2012 Edwin H. Sutherland Award (American Society of Criminology), 2011 Barrington Moore Book Award (American Sociological Association), Co-Winner 2011 Mary Douglas Prize (American Sociological Association), A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2011, and the 2010 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Excellence.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Ron Schmidt is the co-author (with Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh, Andrew L. Aoki, and Rodney Hero) of Newcomers, Outsiders, and Insiders: Immigrants and the American Racial Politics in the Early 21st Century (University of Michigan Press, 2013). Schmidt is professor of political science at California State University Long Beach. This is a big book that covers long and complex histories of numerous groups in the United States. The authors link the arrival and integration of Latino Americans and Asian Americans to evolving group identities and developing political institutions. They draw interesting comparisons between the legacies of the African American social movements of the Civil Rights era and immigrant protests in other ethnic communities. They conclude with a mixed assessment about where the US now stands in terms of immigrant politics. Gains have been made, but immigrants remain largely shut out of traditional forms of political representation and often lack entre into politics.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] William G. Howell (with David Brent) is the author of the new book Thinking about the Presidency: The Primacy of Power (Princeton UP, 2013). Howell is the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at the University of Chicago, where he holds a joint appointment in the Harris School of Public Policy. Howell’s thesis is simple: “Power is every president’s North Star.” He argues in this succinct book that by focusing attention on the expansion of power, we can best understand the presidency and its evolution. Combining historical analysis of key documents and a synthesis of current scholarship, Howell offers a convincing and provocative case for power as the central feature of the presidency. Given the current attention to the Obama presidency’s treatment of secrets, privacy, and security, Howell’s book has much to add to these contemporary debates. The book builds a deep, scholarly argument, but one that could be read and appreciated by undergraduates and the public-at-large.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Barbara Palmer and Dennis Simon are authors of Women and Congressional Elections: A Century of Change (Lynne Rienner, 2012). Palmer is associate professor of political science at Baldwin Wallace University and Dixon is professor of political science at Southern Methodist University. They have combined to write a deeply informative book about the trajectory of women in congress. The book offers many great anecdotes from the trail blazers: Elizabeth Cady Stanton (the first woman to run for congress), Margaret Chase Smith (the first woman elected to the Senate), and Shirley Chisom (the first African American woman elected to Congress). The authors also put together a new dataset of the universe of women candidates for office. What they find about where women succeed and the challenges they face after winning reveals a lot about what it means for a woman to run for office.

[Cross-posted from New Book in Political Science] Andrew J. Taylor is the author of Congress: A Performance Appraisal (Westview Press, 2013). Taylor is professor of political science in the School of Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State University. His newest book examines the much maligned branch of government and offers some help. He takes the novel approach of establishing a series of benchmarks, as the federal government might about an intransigent agency, and then assesses the extent to which Congress meets those benchmarks. There are 37 benchmarks in total, some that Congress scores highly on – such as many elements of transparency and accessibility – while others – for example, effective policy making – Congress scores poorly. Taylor ends the book with offering recommendations about how to improve Congress through some familiar, but other novel changes. The book would make a great addition to an undergraduate survey of Congress or US political institutions.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Big Ideas] The advent of very powerful computers and the Internet have not “changed everything,” but it has created a new communications context within which almost everything we do will be somewhat changed. One of the “things we do” is governance, that is, the way we organize ourselves politically and, as a result of that organization, provide for the individual and public good. In his fascinating book  Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology (Princeton UP, 2013), John O. McGinnis examines the promise and peril of advanced computation and Internet communications for our democracy. The former (promise), he says, is great if we think deeply about the impact of the new media on politics and public policy. He proposed that we take the bull by the horns and experiment with new technology so that governance can become both more democratic and more efficient. He suggests a number of ways in which the potential of the new media can be made to do just this. Listen in.

[Cross-posted from New Book in Political Science] Over the last several months, I’ve had the pleasure to have a number of political scientists who study education policy on the podcast. Jesse Rhodes, Jeff Henig, and Sarah Reckhow have brought their new books that have focused mainly on the K-12 education system. Andrew Karch offers something different. Karch has written Early Start: Preschool Politics in the United States (University of Michigan Press, 2013), a deep narrative history and assessment of the policy development behind early childhood education policy. Karch is associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota and has focused much of his research agenda on state policy and federalism. In his new book, he weaves together theories from the study of public policy with an intricate story of early childhood education. The tactical lessons advocates could learn from this book make it a must-read inside and outside of the academy. Ideas like venue shopping and coalition building animate many of the critical junctures studied in the book.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Christine Trost is program director of the Center for Right-Wing Studies and associate director of the UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. Her co-editor is Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director and lead researchers of Center for Right-Wing Studies at Berkeley. The volume includes chapters by scholars such Alan Abramowitz (Emory University), Martin Cohen (James Madison University), Clarence Lo (University of Missouri at Columbia), but also has several chapters written by practitioners, lending the book a varied assessment on the Tea Party. These authors unearth what Trost and Rosenthal call the “stunning” emergence of the Tea Party following the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Chapters situate the Tea Party in its historical context and consider the extent to which this social movement is best understood as emerging from the grassroots or whether it is better placed into the national conservative movement. The collection is informative and deeply readable together and as individual chapters.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Intellectual History] Drew Maciag, author of Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism (Cornell University Press, 2013) spoke with Ray Haberski about the intellectual challenges Burke raised in a time of democratic revolutions and the legacy he left for thinkers who attempted to leverage tradition in the face of political change.  Maciag’s book is well-written and smartly conceived.  His subject spans the entire history of the United States, from the Revolution to the present day, and introduces readers to American thinkers who continue deserve our attention.  He also does an expert job addressing the conflict between liberalism and conservatism by demonstrating the roles historical contingency and personality play in shaping these complicated terms.  Maciag’s book serves a diverse community of readers, from academics looking for smart arguments about political theory to general readers who are interested in origins and development of the poles of American politics.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Big Ideas] Americans seem to be more concerned about economic inequality today than they have been in living memory. The Occupy Movement (“We are the 99%”) is only the most visible sign of this growing unease. But what are the dimensions of inequality in the United States? How have they changed over the past century? Are we living in a new Gilded Age in which the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer? In his “book” (it’s really an innovative website) Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality (Institute for Policy Studies, 2013), Colin Gordon sets out to answer these questions. Using an interesting array of charts, graphs, and videos, Gordon tells the story of inequality in the U.S. in modern times. Gordon shows that in recent decades the poor have been getting relatively poorer and the rich have been getting relatively richer. The “gap”–already considerable–is growing. In this interview we discuss growing inequality and the reasons behind it. We also touch on what is perhaps the most important question in the debate: does inequality as it is found in the U.S. really matter economically, spiritually, and politically?

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Nicco Mele  is the author of The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath (St. Martin’s Press, 2013). He is Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Harvard University. Mele writes as a technology expert and as a witness to history. He served as a campaign staffer for the Howard Dean for President Campaign in 2003. He and his colleagues implemented many of the web-based campaign innovations that resulted in President Obama winning the 2008 presidential election and define the modern American political campaign. Mele links that experience with radical social changes brought about by the internet. His title thesis, The End of Big, suggest that big institutions in nearly every sector of our lives (business, government, news) have been eroded and, in some cases, supplanted by smallness. An enthusiast for technology, Mele also cautions against the risks associated with this transformation.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Shannon Gleeson is the author of Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston (Cornell University Press, 2012). Dr. Gleeson is assistant professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. San Jose, CA and Houston, TX are two of the country’s largest gateways for immigrants, and these cases used to explain how immigration policy is implemented at the local level. Gleeson unearths the varied ways political institutions and civic actors accommodate the large number of newcomers and enact worker rights laws. While deeply rooted in theories from sociology, the book’s success in mapping the political players and local politics makes it an important read for political scientists, particularly those interested in interest groups and civil society. Gleeson also draws in the role foreign consulates increasingly play in protecting the rights of migrants.