Political Science

In this book Professor Michael Gerhardt provides the first comprehensive effort to use both social science methods and conventional legal analysis to explain the role of precedent in constitutional law. His analysis demonstrates how precedent influences more than social scientists claim, but less than most scholars claim. He further shows how precedent, broadly understood, performs multiple significant but underappreciated functions in constitutional decision making both inside courts and outside of them. Last, but not least, his analysis explains a fundamental tension in constitutional adjudication in which precedent is generally respected as an abstract principle but particular precedents rarely constrain the decisions of courts and nonjudicial actors.

What Americans know, understand, and believe about the world of politics is the product of a negotiation between journalists and political actors. The news is primarily shaped not by a liberal or conservative bias, but by the need for news to be dramatic and easily packaged. Consequently, the frames into which events are fit – more than any objective idea of truth – determine what information passes through the news filter.

The Press Effect surveys events in a critical period of American history, from the election of 2000 through the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. In each of the events that took place, journalists inhabited a different role that shaped the news. During the election between Bush and Gore, they acted as amateur psychologists, delving into the minds of the candidates in an attempt to reveal their true character. On election night, they acted as soothsayers, while in the postelection events in Florida, the press actively shaped events. On September 11 and after, journalists functioned as patriots, seeking to unify the country. In each case, the role inhabited by the press left critical questions unanswered and allowed distortions of the facts to pass into news. The book closes with a discussion of the means by which the press can enhance its most critical role, that of custodian of fact.

Offers the first comprehensive history of international efforts to protect the ozone layer by abandoning the use of chlorofluorohydrocarbons (CFCs), and underlines that this is the greatest success yet achieved in managing human impacts on the global environment. The arguments advanced to explain how this success was achieved are theoretically novel and of great significance for the management of other global problems, particularly global climate change. An account is provided of ozone‐depletion issues from the first attempts to develop international action in the 1970s to the mature functioning of the present international ozone protection regime. Examines the parallel developments of politics and negotiations, scientific understanding and controversy, technological progress, and industry strategy that shaped the issue's development and its effective management. Important new insights are offered into how the interactions among these domains influenced the formation and adaptation of the ozone protection regime. In addressing the initial formation of the regime, the book argues that authoritative scientific assessments were crucial in constraining policy debates, and shaping negotiated agreements. Assessments gave scientific claims an ability to change policy actors’ behaviour that the claims themselves, however well known and verified, lacked. Concerning subsequent adaptation of the regime, the book identifies a series of feedbacks between the periodic revision of chemical controls and the strategic responses of affected industries, which drove rapid application of new approaches to reduce ozone‐depicting chemicals. These feedbacks, promoted by the regime's novel technology assessment process, allowed worldwide use of the CFCs to decline further and faster than even the boldest predictions — by nearly 95%t within ten years.

This book traces the roots of the contemporary crisis of progressive liberalism deep into the nation's racial past. It argues that the contemporary conservative claim that the American liberal tradition has been rooted in a “color blind” conception of individual rights is inaccurate and misleading. In contrast, American liberalism has alternatively served both to support and oppose racial hierarchy, as well as socioeconomic equity more broadly. Racial politics in the United States have repeatedly made it exceedingly difficult to establish powerful constituencies that understand socioeconomic equity as vital to American democracy and aspire to limit gross disparities of wealth, power, and status. Revitalizing such equalitarian conceptions of American liberalism, the book suggests, will require developing new forms of racial and class identity that support, rather than sabotage such fundamental political commitments.

This book examines how the social fact of race shapes the ethical-political orientations of citizens in diverse democracies. It develops the concept of racialized solidarity; explores its impact on current conceptions of racial justice, particularly as formulated in theories of multiculturalism; and suggests how it might begin to be addressed. Political solidarity is the reciprocal relation of trust and obligation between members of a political community necessary for them to live together on terms of fairness, reciprocity, and mutual respect. The contours of political solidarity continue to be indelibly shaped by race, however. Racialized solidarity is thus an important obstacle to racial justice. Weaving together insights drawn from African American political philosophy, theories of multiculturalism, and the literature on solidarity in political theory, the book develops a distinctive approach to questions of racial justice. Against the prevailing tendency to claim that the best way to deal with racism is to abandon the concept of race altogether, the book suggests that one way to begin to confront the racialized politics of solidarity is to attempt to transform the ethical-historical perspectives of dominant groups by making whiteness visible. This requires confronting past collective injustices and transforming the content of the political community's public memory so that it reflects the ethical-political perspectives of both dominant and subordinated groups. The book provides a detailed analysis of Latin American models of multiculturalism, which are compared to those developed in the United States and Canada.

Since 1950, the South has undergone the most dramatic political transformation of any region in the country. The Solid (Democratic) South is now overwhelmingly Republican, and long-disenfranchised African Americans vote at levels comparable to those of whites. This book's theory of relative advantage provides a new perspective on this party system transformation. Specifically, this work advances the idea that local strategic dynamics, namely the organizational development of the Republican Party and the mobilization of the black electorate, were the centerpieces of political change in the region. Written more than six decades ago, V. O. Key’s seminal work on the region highlighted the fact that the politics of the South was permeated by the issue of race. The central finding of his work is that race was, and still is, the locus of political change in the South. This conclusion stands in stark contrast to recent scholarship that points to in-migration, economic growth, or religious factors as being more pivotal agents of change. Besides the direct contribution this work makes to the study of Southern politics, it also contains implications for our understanding of party system change (including realignments), racial politics, and the role that state and local political dynamics play with regard to national politics and policymaking.

Historians of the Civil Rights era typically treat the key events of the 1950s Brown v. Board of Education — sit-ins, bus boycotts, and marches — as contributing toward a revolutionary social upheaval that upended a rigid caste system. While the 1950s was a watershed era in Southern and civil rights history, the tendency has been to paint the preceding Jim Crow era as a brutal system that featured none of the progressive reform impulses so apparent at the federal level and in the North. As the author shows in this reappraisal of the Jim Crow era, this argument is too simplistic, and is true to neither the 1950s nor the long era of Jim Crow that finally solidified in 1910. Focusing on the political development of the South between 1910 and 1954, this book considers the genuine efforts by white and black progressives to reform the system without destroying it. These reformers assumed that the system was there to stay, and therefore felt that they had to work within it in order to modernize the South. Consequently, white progressives tried to install a better — meaning more equitable — separate-but-equal system, and elite black reformers focused on ameliorative (rather than confrontational) solutions that would improve the lives of African Americans. The book concentrates on local and state reform efforts throughout the South in areas like schooling, housing, and labor. Many of the reforms made a difference, but they had the ironic impact of generating more demand for social change among blacks. The author is able to show how demands slowly rose over time, and how the system laid the seeds of its own destruction. The reformers' commitment to a system that was less unequal — albeit not truly equal — and more like the North, led to significant policy changes over time. As this book demonstrates, our lack of knowledge about the cumulative policy transformations resulting from the Jim Crow reform impulse, impoverishes our understanding of the Civil Rights revolution. Reforming Jim Crow aims to rectify that.

In this new interpretation of America's origins, the author argues that during the Constitutional debates, the Federalists were primarily concerned with building a state able to act vigorously in defense of American national interests. By transferring the powers of war making and resource extraction from states to the national government, the US Constitution created a nation‐state invested with all the important powers of Europe's eighteenth‐century “fiscal‐military states.” However, the political traditions and institutions of America, whose people had a deeply ingrained distrust of unduly concentrated authority, were incompatible with a strong centralized government based on the European pattern. To secure the adoption of the Constitution, the Federalists needed to build a very different state – they had to accommodate the formation of a powerful national government to the strong current of anti‐statism in the American political tradition. They did so by designing an administration that would be powerful in times of crisis, but would make limited demands on citizens and entailed sharp restrictions on the physical presence of the national government in society. The Constitution was the Federalists’ promise of the benefits of government without its costs – statecraft rather than strong central authority as the solution to governing. The book takes advantage of a newly published edition of the constitutional debates in recovering a neglected strand of Federalist argument, and making a case for rethinking the formation of the federal American state. It is arranged in three main parts: I. Interpreting the Debate over Ratification (four chapters); II. Military Powers (five chapters); and III. Fiscal Powers (five chapters).

When we think of women's activism in America, figures such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan invariably come to mind—those liberal doyennes who have fought for years to chip away at patriarchy and achieve gender equality. But women's interests are not synonymous with organizations like NOW anymore. As this book shows, the conservative ascendancy that began in the Reagan era has been accompanied by the emergence of a broad-based conservative women's movement. And while firebrands like Ann Coulter and Phyllis Schlafly may be the public face of right-wing women's activism, a handful of large and established women's organizations have proven to be the most effective promoters of the conservative agenda. This book shows that one of the key—albeit overlooked—developments in political activism since the 1980s has been the emergence of conservative women's organizations. It focuses on the most prominent of these groups, Concerned Women for America (CWA) and the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), to reveal how they are using feminist rhetoric for conservative ends: outlawing abortion, restricting pornography, and bolstering the traditional family. But ironically, these organizations face a paradox: to combat the legacy of feminism—particularly its appeal to the majority of American women—they must use the rhetoric of women's empowerment. Indeed, the book illustrates how conservative activists are often the beneficiaries of the very feminist politics they oppose. Yet just as importantly, it demolishes two widely believed truisms: that conservatism holds no appeal to women and that modern conservatism is hostile to the very notion of women's activism.