General

Over the last quarter century, a nationalized and increasingly conservative Republican Party made unprecedented gains at the state level, winning control of twenty-four new state governments. Liberals and conservatives alike anticipated far-reaching...

In 2008 the world experienced the Great Recession, a financial and economic crisis of enormous proportions and the greatest economic downturn since the 1930s. In its wake, unemployment became a key preoccupation of West European publics and politicians...

Can America Govern Itself? brings together a diverse group of distinguished scholars to analyze how rising party polarization and economic inequality have affected the performance of American governing institutions. It is organized around two themes: the...

Although Latinos are now the largest non-majority group in the United States, existing research on white attitudes toward Latinos has focused almost exclusively on attitudes toward immigration. This book changes that. It argues that such accounts...

Examining a key puzzle in the study of electoral violence, this study asks how elites organize violence and why ordinary citizens participate. While existing theories of electoral violence emphasize weak institutions, ethnic cleavages, and the strategic...

A long-standing debate in American politics is about the proper structure for political parties and the relative power that should be afforded to party professionals versus issue activists. In this book, Byron E. Shafer and Regina L. Wagner draw...

Why did so many Latin American leftists believe they could replicate the Cuban Revolution in their own countries, and why did so many rightists fear the spread of Communism? Cognitive-psychological insights about people's distorted inferences and skewed...

The victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 election left specialists of American politics perplexed and concerned about the future of US democracy. Because no populist leader had occupied the White House in 150 years, there were many questions about what to...

As Brazilian democracy faces a crisis of legitimacy, political divisions grow among Catholic, evangelical, and non-religious citizens. What has caused religious polarization in Brazilian politics? Does religious politics shore up or undermine democracy?...

Discrimination against Muslim Americans has soared over the last two decades with hostility growing especially acute since 2016 - in no small part due to targeted attacks by policymakers and media. Outsiders at Home offers the first systematic,...

When do local communities benefit from natural resource extraction? In some regions of natural resource extraction, firms provide goods and services to local communities, but in others, protest may occur, leading to government regulatory or repressive...

Two aspects of contemporary urban life in Africa are often described as sources of political change: the emergence of a large urban middle class and high levels of ethnic diversity and inter-ethnic social contact. Many expected that these factors would...

Paying taxes is one of the least popular activities worldwide. Latin America in particular is notorious for having low direct taxes, weak compliance and enforcement, and high levels of inequality. Although fiscal extraction has gained renewed interest...

In 2015, Nigeria's voters cast out the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP). Here, A. Carl LeVan traces the political vulnerability of Africa's largest party in the face of elite bargains that facilitated a democratic transition in 1999. These 'pacts'...

Why do governance reforms in developing democracies so often fail, and when might they succeed? When Democracies Deliver offers a dynamic framework for assessing the effectiveness and durability of policy change. Drawing on detailed analyses of public...

Social policies can transform the lives of the poor and marginalized, yet inequitable implementation often limits their access. Uneven Social Policies shifts the focus of welfare state analysis away from policy design and toward policy implementation. By...

In State-Sponsored Activism, Rich explores AIDS policy in Brazil as a lens to offer new insight into state-society relations in democratic and post-neoliberal Latin America. In contrast to the dominant view that these dual transitions produced an...

Brazil's quality of democracy remains limited by enduring obstacles including the weakness of parties and underrepresentation of marginalized groups. Party Institutionalization and Women's Representation in Democratic Brazil theorizes the connections...

While much is known about who votes in American elections, much less is known about who donates. In this book, the authors utilize a unique and historically unprecedented data set of donors from the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections to answer...

Conventional wisdom suggests that partisanship has little impact on voter behavior in Brazil; what matters most is pork-barreling, incumbent performance, and candidates' charisma. This book shows that soon after redemocratization in the 1980s, over half...

World War II played an important role in the trajectory of race and American political development, but the War's effects were much more complex than many assume. Steven White offers an extensive analysis of rarely utilized survey data and archival...

This book explains a long-standing puzzle in American politics: why so many Americans support downwardly redistributive social welfare programs, when such support seems to fly in the face of standard conceptions of the American public as anti-government,...

Following unprecedented violence in 2007/8, Kenya introduced two classic transitional justice mechanisms: a truth commission and international criminal proceedings. Both are widely believed to have failed, but why? And what do their performances say...

Civic Hope is a history of what everyday Americans say - in their own words - about the government overseeing their lives. Based on a highly original analysis of 10,000 letters to the editor from 1948 to the present published in twelve US cities, the...

Scholars typically emphasize the importance of organized networks and long-term relationships for sustaining electoral clientelism. Yet electoral clientelism remains widespread in many countries despite the weakening of organized parties. This book...

Military coups are a constant threat in Africa and many former military leaders are now in control of 'civilian states', yet the military remains understudied, especially over the last decade. Drawing on extensive archival research, cross-national data,...

The European Union was created for the purpose of encouraging peace on the continent, but today is increasingly active globally in areas such as diplomacy, development, humanitarian and consular aid, and civilian and military crisis management. Yet we...

Primary elections were supposed to limit the influence of party bosses on the nomination process. The decision to run for House or Senate and a candidate's success in securing the party's nomination for these offices has been considered to be largely...

State development in Africa is risky, even life-threatening. Heads of state must weigh the advantage of promoting political and economic development against the risk of fortifying dangerous political rivals. This book takes a novel approach to the study...

The Space between Us brings the connection between geography, psychology, and politics to life. By going into the neighborhoods of real cities, Enos shows how our perceptions of racial, ethnic, and religious groups are intuitively shaped by where these...

The success of democratic governance hinges on an electorate's ability to reward elected officials who act faithfully and punish those who do not. Yet there is considerable variation among voters in their ability to objectively evaluate representatives'...

Primary elections were supposed to limit the influence of party bosses on the nomination process. The decision to run for House or Senate and a candidate's success in securing the party's nomination for these offices has been considered to be largely...

For the past forty years, prominent pro-life activists, judges and politicians have invoked the history and legacy of American slavery to elucidate aspects of contemporary abortion politics. As is often the case, many of these popular analogies have been...

The Politics of Major Policy Reform in Postwar America examines the politics of recent landmark policy in areas such as homeland security, civil rights, health care, immigration and trade, and it does so within a broad theoretical and historical context...

The race problem in the American criminal justice system persists because we enable it. The tendency of liberals to point a finger at law enforcement, racial conservatives, the War on Drugs, is misguided. Black as well as white voters, Democrat as much...

Jeffrey E. Cohen asks why US presidents send to Congress the legislative proposals that they do and what Congress does with those proposals. His study covers nearly the entire history of the presidency, from 1789 to 2002. The long historical scope allows...

The People's Government is premised on the idea that democracy is based on two fundamental rights: freedom and liberty. Liberty is the right to be left alone, while freedom is the right to participate in a political community. How people view democracy...

During the Cold War, U.S. intelligence was concerned primarily with states; non-state actors like terrorists were secondary. Now the priorities are reversed and the challenge is enormous. States had an address, and they were hierarchical and bureaucratic...

The ninth edition of this respected textbook provides a fresh perspective and a crisp introduction to congressional politics. Informed by the authors' Capitol Hill experience and scholarship, the new edition reflects changes resulting from the November...

Congress is frequently said to be 'broken', 'dysfunctional', and 'weak', but how does the contemporary Congress really work? Does Congress have the capacity to solve major policy problems? Can it check an aggrandizing executive, oversee a powerful...