American Politics

It is frequently assumed that the “people” must have something in common, or else democracy will fail. This assumption that democracy requires commonality – such as a shared nationality, a common culture, or consensus on a core set of values – sets theorists and political actors alike on a futile search for what we have in common, and generates misplaced anxiety when it turns out that this commonality is not forthcoming. Sharing Democracy argues that this preoccupation with commonality misdirects our attention toward what we share and away from how we share in democracy. This produces an ironically anti-democratic tendency to emphasize the passive possession of commonality at the expense of promoting the active exercise of political freedom. This book counteracts this tendency by exposing the reasons for the persistent allure of the common. Sharing Democracy offers in its stead a radical vision of democracy grounded in political freedom: the capacity of ordinary people to make and remake the world in which they live. This vision of democracy is exemplified in protest marches: cacophonous, unpredictable, and self-authorizing collective enactments of our world-building freedom.

Social Movements and the Transformation of American Health Care examines dynamics of change in health care institutions through the lens of contemporary theory and research on collective action. Bringing together scholars from medicine, health management and policy, history, sociology, and political science, the book conceptualizes the American health care system as being organized around multiple institutions—including the state, biomedical fields, professions, and health delivery organizations. By shifting attention toward the organizing structures and political logics of these institutions, the essays in this book illuminate the diversity in both sites of health‐related collective action and the actors seeking transformations in health institutions. The book considers health‐related social movements at four distinct levels of analysis. At the most macro level, essays analyze social movements that seek changes from the state in the regulation, financing, and distribution of health resources. A second set of essays considers field‐level analyses of institutional changes in such wide‐ranging areas as public health, bio‐ethics, long‐term care, abortion, and AIDS services. A third set of essays examines the relationship between social movements and professions, examining the “boundary crossing” that occurs when professionals participate in social movements or seek changes in existing professions and the health practices they endorse. A final set of essays analyzes the cultural dominance of the medical model for addressing health problems in the United States and its implications for collective attempts to establish the legitimacy of particular issues, framings, and political actors in health care reform.

When the Democrats retook control of the United States House of Representatives in January 2007 after twelve years in the wilderness, Nancy Pelosi became the first woman speaker in American history. This book provides a comprehensive account of how Pelosi became speaker and what this tells us about Congress in the 21st century. It considers the key issues that Pelosi’s rise presents for American politics, highlights the core themes that have shaped, and continue to shape, her remarkable career, and discusses the challenges that women face in the male-dominated world of American politics, particularly at its highest levels. The book also sheds light on Pelosi’s political background: first as the scion of a powerful Baltimore political family whose power base lay in East Coast urban ethnic politics, and later as a successful politician in what is probably the most liberal city in the country, San Francisco. The book traces how she built her base within the House Democratic Caucus and ultimately consolidated enough power to win the Speakership. It shows how twelve years out of power allowed her to fashion a new image for House Democrats, and it concludes with an analysis of her institutional leadership style.

Millions of Americans were mystified by, and outraged, by the US Supreme Court's role in deciding the presidential election of 2000. The Court had held a unique place in the system of checks and balances, seen as the embodiment of fairness and principle, precisely because it was perceived to be above the political fray. How could it now issue a decision that reeked of partisan politics, and send to the White House a candidate who may have actually lost the election? Addresses these questions head‐on, and demystifies Bush vs Gore for those who are still angered by the court's decision but unclear about its meaning. Digs deeply into the Court's earlier writings and rulings, and proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the justices who gave George W. Bush the presidency contradicted their previous positions to do so. Shows how the use by the five majority justices of the equal‐protection clause to halt the Florida recount was utterly irreconcilable with their previous jurisprudence, and how each violated his or her own judicial philosophy in crafting a monstrous opinion that cannot be squared with their prior opinions.

This book presents the previously untold history of the use of new media in Democratic electoral campaigning over the last decade. Drawing on open-ended interviews with more than fifty political staffers, fieldwork during the 2008 electoral cycle, and archival research, the book follows a group of technically skilled Internet staffers who came together on the Howard Dean campaign and created a series of innovations in campaign organization, tools, and practice. After the election, these individuals founded an array of consulting firms and training organizations and staffed a number of prominent Democratic campaigns. In the process, they carried their innovations across Democratic politics and contributed to a number of electoral victories, including Barack Obama’s historic bid for the presidency. The book contributes to an interdisciplinary body of scholarship from communication, sociology, and political science. The book theorizes processes of innovation in online electoral politics. It shows how the innovations of the Dean and Obama campaigns were the product of the movement of staffers between industries, organizational structures that provided a space for technical development, and incentives for experimentation. The book also analyzes how Dean’s former staffers created an infrastructure for Democratic new media campaigning after the 2004 elections that helped transfer knowledge, practice, and tools across electoral cycles and campaigns. The book shows how organizational contexts shaped the use of tools by the Obama campaign, analyzes the emergence of data systems that facilitate electoral coordination, and reveals how cultural work mobilizes supporters to participate in collective action.

Social capital theorists have shown that inequality arises in part because some people enjoy larger, more supportive, or otherwise more useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than others? This book argues that the answer lies less in people's deliberate “networking” than in the institutional conditions of the churches, colleges, firms, gyms, and other organizations in which they happen to participate routinely. This book introduces a model of social inequality that takes seriously the embeddedness of networks in formal organizations, proposing that what people gain from their connections depends on where those connections are formed and sustained. The model is illustrated and developed through a study of the experiences of mothers whose children were enrolled in New York City childcare centers. As a result of the routine practices and institutional conditions of the centers—from the structure of their parents' associations, to apparently innocuous rules such as pick‐up and drop‐off times—many of these mothers dramatically increased their social capital and measurably improved their wellbeing. Yet how much they gained depended on how their respective centers were organized. This book identifies the mechanisms through which childcare centers structured the networks of mothers, and shows that similar mechanisms operate in many other routine organizations, from beauty salons and bath houses to colleges and churches. The book makes a case for the importance of organizational embeddedness in the study of personal ties.

The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown at an explosive rate in our era of globalization. Yet as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. The crisis exposed the system's manifold political and economic dysfunctionalities. This book is a historically informed account of the American state's development from the 19th century to the present. It focuses in particular on the state-produced inequalities and administrative incoherence that became so apparent in the post-1970s era. The book offers an unsettling account of the growth of racial and economic inequality, the ossification of the state, the gradual erosion of democracy, and the problems deriving from imperial overreach. Utilizing the framework of sustainability, a concept that is currently informing some of the best work on governance and development, the chapters in this book show how the USA's current trajectory does not imply an impending collapse, but rather a gradual erosion of capacity and legitimacy. That is a more appropriate theoretical framework, the book contends, because for all of its manifest flaws, the American state is durable. That durability, however, does not preclude a long relative decline.

This volume presents a research agenda, developed by leading scholars of American politics, suggesting directions that could fruitfully shape the study of women and American politics in the early 21st century. Each contributor was asked to identify existing gaps in knowledge in her area of expertise, to think about new directions for research, and to imagine the kinds of research projects that would both enhance our understanding of the dynamics surrounding women's participation in American politics and facilitate the efforts of those who are working to increase women's representation and influence in politics. The volume includes useful reviews of existing research about various aspects of women's political participation, but the primary focus is on important research questions that pose a challenge for the next generation of scholars. The contributors to this volume suggest approaches, methods, and topics for future research on the following subjects: political recruitment, campaign strategy, money, political leadership, parties and women's organizations, the gender gap in voting and public opinion, media, women of colour, and participation outside of conventional electoral politics. This volume originated from a conference organized by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.