American Politics

This book argues that among other things, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Congress evolved. In short, the book argues that air conditioning altered the demography of the southern states, which in turn changed the political parties of the South, which transformed the composition and in due course the performance of the US House of Representatives. This evolutionary process led to the House’s liberalization and later to its transformation into an arena of sharp partisanship, visible among both Democrats and Republicans. This book offers an explanation for important transformations in the congressional environment.

In How Women Represent Women: Political Parties, Gender and Representation in the State Legislatures, Tracy Osborn examines two avenues through which political parties fundamentally affect how women legislators represent women by creating women’s issues policies. First, women’s party identities shape the types of policy alternatives they offer to solve women’s policy problems. Second, parties organize the legislative process by holding majority control, to varying degrees, over agenda setting and policy creation, promoting some women legislators’ policy proposals over others. Osborn tests these two avenues of influence by comparing partisan women’s legislative behavior toward the creation of women’s issues policies across different party environments in the U.S. state legislatures. She uses original election, sponsorship, and roll call data in nearly all ninety-nine state legislative chambers in 1999-2000. She concludes that Republican and Democratic women offer different solutions to women’s policy problems based in their party identities. Depending on which party controls the legislative process and how strongly they do so, this party control promotes one set of partisan policy alternatives over the other. Thus, political parties determine which women’s issues policies become law. Ultimately, this book demonstrates how essential parties are to understanding how women elected to public office translate their interest in women’s issues into substantive public policy.

Prior to the 1960s, when African Americans had little access to formal political power, black popular culture was commonly seen as a means of forging community and effecting political change. But as this book shows, despite the changes brought about by the civil rights movement, and contrary to the wishes of those committed to narrower conceptions of politics, black artists have continued to play a significant role in the making and maintenance of critical social spaces. The book offers a portrait of the relationship between popular culture and institutionalized politics, tracing the connections between artists such as Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Pryor, Bob Marley and Erykah Badu and those individuals working in the protest, electoral, and policy making arenas. With an emphasis on questions of class, gender, sexuality, diaspora and coloniality, the book also illustrates how creative artists destabilize modern notions of the proper location of politics, and politics itself.

The Iraq War in 2003 led to a deep crisis in American–European relations. France and Germany, not Russia and China, emerged as the major critics of the US intervention. Some spoke about the death of NATO, to be replaced by “coalitions of the willing”; more temperate voices referred to transatlantic drift. Deep structural forces were allegedly at work: the end of the cold war, a turn to the right in the United States, the emergence of a more independent Europe. Yet, there had always been crises in NATO. They had come and gone ever since the organization was founded in 1949. In George W. Bush's second term relations between the United States and Europe improved considerably. The United States discovered that it needed allies; the Democrats took control of Congress. Under Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy Germany and France again moved closer to the USA; the defeat of the constitutional treaty slowed the independence of the EU. So, did the initial Bush years represent just another crisis in Atlantic relations, already come and gone like the many crises of the past, or did they represent deep, structural forces at work? In this book leading historians and political scientists on both sides of the Atlantic give different, but always stimulating answers to this question.

Cheaper transportation, faster communication, and lowered trade barriers have made people, firms, and their assets much more mobile. This increasing mobility has strained traditional notions that laws operate within geographic borders. Instead, some nations find their laws powerless to control or regulate behavior, while others pass laws that have profound effects on assets and activities worldwide. Today, states increasingly act as hawkers of legal rules in a market for law where people and firms often can shop for those regimes that they find most desirable. A California resident can incorporate her shipping business in Delaware, register her ships in Panama, hire her employees from Hong Kong, place her earnings in an asset-protection trust formed in the Cayman Islands, and enter into a same-sex marriage in Massachusetts or Canada, and in doing so, she can enjoy the California sunshine while at least potentially avoiding many facets of the state's laws.

The law market carries the promise of improving our lives as well as the quality of the laws that govern us because it helps to discipline interest group attempts to pass laws that impose costs on society. But the law market also threatens governments' ability to protect its citizens from harmful private conduct. Given this trade-off, the book argues that simple contractual choice-of-law rules can help maximize the beneficial effects of the law market while tempering its costs. This approach often is superior to attempts to federalize legal rules in the United States or to harmonize legal rules across nations. Moreover, lawmakers have powerful incentives to enforce parties' bargains regarding the applicable law in order to attract or retain mobile firms and residents.

The book shows how their insights and recommendations apply across a wide variety of legal problems, including corporate governance, securities, franchise, trust, property, marriage, living will, surrogacy, and general contract regulations. This book therefore provides a useful template for analyzing the role of law in an increasingly mobile world.

Spanning the entire 20th century and encompassing immigration policies, the nationalistic fallout from both world wars, the civil rights movement, and nation-building efforts in the postcolonial era, this book advances a major new interpretation of American nationalism and the future prospects for diverse democracies. Tracing how Americans have confronted and relinquished, but mostly clung to group identities over the past century, the book debunks one of the guiding assumptions of American nationhood, namely that group distinction and identification would gradually dissolve over time, creating a “postethnic” nation. The divisions in American society have consistently proven themselves too strong to dissolve and, for better or for worse, the often-disparaged politics of multiculturalism are here to stay, with profound implications for America's democracy.

Policymaking in large bureaucracies is hardly a simple process. Even the most respected policymakers have to contend with obstacles that seemingly have little to do with the issue at hand—office politics, work structure, and shifting political environments. Yet learning to manage such complex environments is necessary for good policymaking. This book outlines the complex thought processes of policymakers as they struggle to influence both foreign and domestic policy decisions from within the United States government bureaucracy. Focusing on three critical situations to illuminate the politics of policy choice—the successful attempt to sell missiles to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s; the Iran-Contra scandal; and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s attempt to regulate smoking as well as the efforts to do the same by an outside lobbyist—the book dissects the intuitive yet rigorous framework that highly skilled policymakers follow in order to influence government outcomes. Throughout, this book offers detailed accounts of the policy process at work in the Reagan, first Bush, and Clinton administrations, from the cabinet level down to the middle tiers of the federal bureaucracy. The book describes the shifting real-world conditions that government officials face as they struggle to shape the policy agenda, offering a look at the complex considerations involved from all perspectives, with concrete examples.

The era of economic liberalization, spanning 1978 to 2008, is often regarded as a period in which government was simply dismantled. In fact, government was reconstructed to meet the needs of a globalized economy. Central banking, fiscal control, tax collection, regulation, port and airport management, infrastructure development—in all of these areas, radical reforms were made to the architecture of government. A common philosophy shaped all of these reforms: the logic of discipline. It was premised on deep skepticism about the ability of democratic processes to make sensible policy choices. It sought to impose constraints on elected officials and citizens, often by shifting power to technocrat-guardians who were shielded from political influence. It placed great faith in the power of legal changes—new laws, treaties, and contracts—to produce significant alterations in the performance of governmental systems. Even before the global economic crisis of 2007-2009, the logic of discipline was under assault. Faced with many failed reform projects, advocates of discipline realized that they had underestimated the complexity of governmental change. Opponents of discipline emphasized the damage to democratic values that followed from the empowerment of new groups of technocrat-guardians. The financial crisis did further damage to the logic of discipline, as governments modified their attitudes about central bank independence and fiscal control, and global financial and trade flows declined. It was the market that now appeared to behave myopically and erratically, and which now insisted that governments should abandon precepts about the role of government that it had once insisted were inviolable. An account of neoliberal governmental restructuring across the world, The Logic of Discipline offers an analysis of how this undemocratic model is unravelling in the face of a monumental and ongoing failure of the market.

The internet is facilitating a generational transition within America’s advocacy group system. New “netroots” political associations have arisen in the past decade and play an increasingly prominent role in citizen political mobilization. At the same time, the organizations that mediate citizen political engagement and sustained collective action are changing. They rely upon modified staff structures and work routines. They employ novel strategies and tactical repertoires. Rather than “organizing without organizations,” the new media environment has given rise to “organizing through different organizations.” This book provides a richly detailed analysis of this disruptive transformation. It highlights changes in membership and fundraising regimes—established industrial patterns of supporter interaction and revenue streams—that were pioneered by MoveOn.org and have spread broadly within the advocacy system. Through interviews, content analysis, and direct observation of the leading netroots organizations, the book offers fresh insights into 21st-century political organizing. The book highlights important variations among the new organizations—including internet-mediated issue generalists like MoveOn, community blogs like DailyKos.com, and neo-federated groups like DemocracyforAmerica.com. It also explores a wider set of netroots infrastructure organizations that provide supporting services to membership-based advocacy associations. The rise of the political netroots has had a distinctly partisan character: conservatives have repeatedly tried and failed to build equivalents to the organizations and infrastructure of the progressive netroots. The book investigates these efforts, as well as the late-forming Tea Party movement, and introduces the theory of Outparty Innovation Incentives as an explanation for the partisan adoption of political technology.

In searching for answers as to why young people differ vastly from their parents and grandparents when it comes to turning out the vote, this book challenges the conventional wisdom that today's youth is plagued by a severe case of political apathy. In order to understand the current nature of citizen engagement, it is critical to separate political from civic engagement. Using the results from an original set of surveys and primary research, the book concludes that while older citizens participate by voting, young people engage by volunteering and being active in their communities.