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A long-dominant reading of American politics holds that public policy in the United States is easily captured by special interest groups. Countering this view, Adam Sheingate traces the development of government intervention in agriculture from its nineteenth-century origins to contemporary struggles over farm subsidies. His considered conclusion is that American institutions have not given agricultural interest groups any particular advantages in the policy process, in part because opposing lobbies also enjoy access to policymakers. In fact, the high degree of conflict and pluralism maintained by American institutions made possible substantial retrenchment of the agricultural welfare state ...
This book reveals how conflicting worldviews are at the root of public controversies on policy and trade issues. It highlights the particularly controversial disputes at the level of the World Trade Organization in the case of regulating beef-hormones and GMOs, aiming to show how negotiators of international agreements, members of dispute settlement bodies, and policy makers in general could have recourse to concepts of other disciplines such as epistemology and philosophy in order to address deadlocked legal disputes. Ultimately, the book is a manifesto for independent and critical research.
Political races in the United States rely heavily on highly paid political consultants who carefully curate the images of politicians, advise candidates on polling and analytics, and shape voters' perceptions through marketing and advertising techniques. More than half of the $6 billion spent in the 2012 election went to consultants who controlled virtually every aspect of the campaigns, from polling, fundraising, and media to more novel techniques of social media and micro-targeting. These consultants play a central role in political campaigns-determining not only how the public sees politicians, but also how politicians see the public. In Building a Business of Politics, author Adam Sheing...
How did the federal judiciary transcend early limitations to become a powerful institution of American governance? How did the Supreme Court move from political irrelevance to political centrality? Building the Judiciary uncovers the causes and consequences of judicial institution-building in the United States from the commencement of the new government in 1789 through the close of the twentieth century. Explaining why and how the federal judiciary became an independent, autonomous, and powerful political institution, Justin Crowe moves away from the notion that the judiciary is exceptional in the scheme of American politics, illustrating instead how it is subject to the same architectonic p...
In 2007 the farm subsidies of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy took over 40 percent of the entire EU budget. How did a sector of diminishing social and economic importance manage to maintain such political prominence? The conventional answer focuses on the negotiations among the member states of the European Community from 1958 onwards. That story holds that the political priority, given to the CAP, as well as its long-term stability, resides in a basic devil's bargain between French agriculture and German industry. In Farmers on Welfare, a landmark new account of the making of the single largest European policy ever, Ann-Christina L. Knudsen suggests that this accepted narrat...
In The Rhetorical Presidency, Jeffrey Tulis argues that the president’s relationship to the public has changed dramatically since the Constitution was enacted: while previously the president avoided any discussions of public policy so as to avoid demagoguery, the president is now expected to go directly to the public, using all the tools of rhetoric to influence public policy. This has effectively created a "second" Constitution that has been layered over, and in part contradicts, the original one. In our volume, scholars from different subfields of political science extend Tulis’s perspective to the judiciary and Congress; locate the origins of the constitutional change in the Progressive Era; highlight the role of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the mass media in transforming the presidency; discuss the nature of demagoguery and whether, in fact, rhetoric is undesirable; and relate the rhetorical presidency to the public’s ignorance of the workings of a government more complex than the Founders imagined. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society.
This book offers an empirical and theoretical study of the Koizumi administration, covering such issues as the characteristics of its political style, its domestic and foreign policies, and its larger historical significance. The key questions that guide its approach are: what enabled Koizumi to exercise unusually strong leadership, and what structural transformations of Japanese politics did he achieve? Uchiyama looks at policy-making processes, newly created institutional arenas such as the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, Koizumi’s populist strategy, foreign policy, and neo-liberal convictions to assess the historical significance of his administration and seek out the basis for its wide public support. Finally, the book undertakes a normative evaluation of the merits and demerits of the Koizumi administration’s political style, and compares it with the Abe and Fukuda administrations that came after. This book will be of interest to scholars and students with an interest in comparative politics, administrative reform, and contemporary Japan.
Seventeen essays illuminate critical junctures in American political development—from the social movements for women's suffrage, civil rights, and workers' rights, to Reconstruction, to the regulation of prescription drugs—as vantage points from which to examine how change is enacted.
Until now political scientists have devoted little attention to the origins of American bureaucracy and the relationship between bureaucratic and interest group politics. In this pioneering book, Daniel Carpenter contributes to our understanding of institutions by presenting a unified study of bureaucratic autonomy in democratic regimes. He focuses on the emergence of bureaucratic policy innovation in the United States during the Progressive Era, asking why the Post Office Department and the Department of Agriculture became politically independent authors of new policy and why the Interior Department did not. To explain these developments, Carpenter offers a new theory of bureaucratic autono...
Few transformations in American politics have been as important as the integration of African Americans into the Democratic Party and the Republican embrace of racial policy conservatism. The story of this partisan realignment on race is often told as one in which political elites—such as Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater—set in motion a dramatic and sudden reshuffling of party positioning on racial issues during the 1960s. Racial Realignment instead argues that top party leaders were actually among the last to move, and that their choices were dictated by changes that had already occurred beneath them. Drawing upon rich data sources and original historical research, Eric Schickler show...