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Since the 1960s, America's policymaking system has transitioned from one in which leaders like Lyndon Johnson could simply disparage the concept of budget projections to one in which policymakers consciously manipulate cost estimates. Paradoxically, the very safeguards put in place to thwart economically unsound legislation now cause chaos by incentivizing the development of flawed, even blatantly unworkable, policies. As Robert Saldin shows in When Bad Policy Makes Good Politics, the pathologies of the new system are illustrated by the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act and its role in aiding passage of President Obama's landmark health reform law. CLASS was supposed to b...
In early 2016, as it became increasingly apparent that Donald Trump might actually become the Republican nominee, a movement within conservatism formed to stop him: Never Trump. Comprised primarily of Republican policy elites and conservative intellectuals, the Never Trumpers saw Trump's stated views as a repudiation of longstanding Republican foreign and domestic policy goals. Just as importantly, they saw him as erratic, mendacious, and unfit--the sort of person the founders warned about and someone who would bring everlasting shame to the Republican Party. Over the coming months, many well-known and previously influential figures signed on to the Never Trump movement. Of course, their eff...
This book examines major foreign conflicts from the Spanish-American War through Vietnam, arguing that international conflicts have strong effects on American political parties, elections, state development, and policymaking. First, major wars expose and highlight problems requiring governmental solutions or necessitating emergency action. Second, despite well-known curtailments of civil liberties, wars often enhance democracy by drawing attention to the contributions of previously marginalized groups and facilitating the extension of fuller citizenship rights to them. Finally, wars affect the party system. Foreign conflicts create crises - many of which are unanticipated - that require immediate attention, supplant prior issues on the policy agenda, and engender shifts in party ideology. These new issues and redefinitions of party ideology frequently influence elections by shaping both elite and mass behavior.
Over the last few years, conservatives in Washington, D.C. and in bright-red states like Georgia and Texas, have abandoned their tough-on-crime rhetoric, and are now leading the charge to curb prison growth. In Prison Break, Steven Teles and David Dagan will explain how this striking turn of events occurred, how it will affect mass incarceration, and what it teaches us about achieving policy breakthroughs in our polarized age. Combining insights from law, sociology, and political science, Teles and Dagan will offer the first comprehensive account of this major political shift.
Some of the nation's wealthiest philanthropies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in education reform. With vast wealth and a political agenda, these foundations have helped to reshape the reform landscape in urban education. In Follow the Money, Sarah Reckhow shows where and how foundation investment in education is occurring and presents in-depth analysis of the effects of these investments within the two largest urban districts in the United States: New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, centralized political control and the use of private resources have enabled ra...
Since the mid-twentieth century, the United States has seen a striking shift in the gender dynamics of higher educational attainment as women have come to earn college degrees at higher rates than men. Women have also made significant strides in terms of socioeconomic status and political engagement. What explains the progress that American women have made since the 1960s? While many point to the feminist movement as the critical turning point, this book makes the case that women's movement toward first class citizenship has been shaped not only by important societal changes, but also by the actions of lawmakers who used a combination of redistributive and regulatory higher education policie...
A short accessible introductory treatment of how climate change affects society, and how social, economic, and political systems can, do, and should respond.
A breakthrough account of how women can overcome the social binds that block their success. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson explores society's interlaced traps and restrictions, she draws on hundreds of interviews with women from all walks of life to show the ways they can cut through the restrictions.
In 1999, Texas passed a landmark clean energy law, beginning a groundswell of new policies that promised to make the US a world leader in renewable energy. As Leah Stokes shows in Short Circuiting Policy, however, that policy did not lead to momentum in Texas, which failed to implement its solar laws or clean up its electricity system. Examining clean energy laws in Texas, Kansas, Arizona, and Ohio over a thirty-year time frame, Stokes argues that organized combat between advocate and opponent interest groups is central to explaining why states are not on track to address the climate crisis. She tells the political history of our energy institutions, explaining how fossil fuel companies and ...
The transformation of Southern politics after World War II changed the political life not just of this distinctive region, but of the entire nation. Until now, the critical shift in Southern political allegiance from Democratic to Republican has been explained, by scholars and journalists, as a white backlash to the civil rights revolution. In this myth-shattering book, Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston refute that view, one stretching all the way back to V. O. Key in his classic book Southern Politics. The true story is instead one of dramatic class reversal, beginning in the 1950s and pulling everything else in its wake. Where once the poor voted Republican and the rich Democrat, that pattern reversed, as economic development became the engine of Republican gains. Racial desegregation, never far from the heart of the story, often applied the brakes to these gains rather than fueling them. A book that is bound to shake up the study of Southern politics, this will also become required reading for pundits and political strategists, for all those who argue over what it takes to carry the South.