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This book provides a standard to gauge partisan gerrymandering, which increased after the Supreme Court ruled it a non-justiciable issue.
The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime. In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now. The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided...
Many observers of American politics believe that representative government, particularly in the Congress, is failing. This book examines the case for failure: what are the outward signs, and how do they reflect breaches of underlying norms of fair and effective representation? The book argues that good representation demands healthy competition between parties, but that in today's America, that competition has run off the rails.
While great strides have been made since the Founding years, the United States continues to suffer from a high degree of political inequality. Some citizens have a louder voice in their democracy than others. Both the malapportioned Senate and Electoral College overrepresent Americans in small states, while gerrymandered districts poorly convert votes into power in the House of Representatives. More than four million Americans living in Washington, D.C., and the territories lack representation in Congress, while citizens everywhere face unnecessary burdens to cast ballots. Biased media and questionable political funding render it difficult to hold elected officials accountable. This book explores these formidable problems and identifies the path to securing a fairer, more representative political system. Sourcing solutions directly from the Constitution, chapters outline the tools that could limit malapportionment, expand voting rights, control the influence of big donors and more. Achieving these reforms, however, requires an engaged citizenry that demands change from those in power.
"How should we think about electoral reform? What are the prospects for modern-day efforts to reform away the two-party system? This book offers a 'shifting coalitions' theory of electoral-system change, puts the Progressive Era in comparative perspective, and warns against repeating history. It casts reform as an effort to get or keep control of government, usually during periods of party realignment. Reform can be used to insulate some coalition, dislodge the one in power, or deal with noncommittal 'centrists.' Whether reform lasts depends less on the number of parties than whether it helps coalitions hold themselves together. This is where the Progressives got it wrong. Unable to win supp...
How we can repair our democracy by rebuilding the mechanisms that power it What’s the best way to determine what most voters want when multiple candidates are running? What’s the fairest way to allocate legislative seats to different constituencies? What’s the least distorted way to draw voting districts? Not the way we do things now. Democracy is mathematical to its very foundations. Yet most of the methods in use are a historical grab bag of the shortsighted, the cynical, the innumerate, and the outright discriminatory. Making Democracy Count sheds new light on our electoral systems, revealing how a deeper understanding of their mathematics is the key to creating civic infrastructure...
What an intensely divisive election portends for American politics The year 2020 was a tumultuous time in American politics. It brought a global pandemic, protests for racial justice, and a razor-thin presidential election outcome. It culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol that attempted to deny Joe Biden’s victory. The Bitter End explores the long-term trends and short-term shocks that shaped this dramatic year and what these changes could mean for the future. John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck demonstrate that Trump’s presidency intensified the partisan politics of the previous decades and the identity politics of the 2016 election. Presidential elections have become...
"This book is a first-of-its-kind treatment of the political beliefs, behaviors, and sociopolitical lives of members of the BDSM, Furries, Polyamory, and Nudists communities. The groups also have a significant number of people who identify as bisexual. These are diverse groups that are often pushed to the periphery of society and when all are combined, are many times larger than the LGT community"--
A trenchant case for a novel philosophical position: that our political thinking is driven less by commitments to freedom or fairness than by an aversion to hierarchy. Niko Kolodny argues that, to a far greater extent than we recognize, our political thinking is driven by a concern to avoid relations of inferiority. In order to make sense of the most familiar ideas in our political thought and discourse—the justification of the state, democracy, and rule of law, as well as objections to paternalism and corruption—we cannot merely appeal to freedom, as libertarians do, or to distributive fairness, as liberals do. We must instead appeal directly to claims against inferiority—to the convi...
“I have no agenda,” US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts proclaimed at his Senate confirmation hearing: “My job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” This declaration was in keeping with the avowed independence of the judiciary. It also, when viewed through the lens of Roberts’s election law decisions, appears to be false. With a scrupulous reading of judicial decisions and a careful assessment of partisan causes and consequences, Terri Jennings Peretti tells the story of the GOP’s largely successful campaign to enlist judicial aid for its self-interested election reform agenda. Partisan Supremacy explores four contemporary election law issues—voter iden...