General

The gap between the rich and the poor has grown dramatically in the United States and is now at its widest since at least the early 1900s. While by most measures the economy has been improving, soaring cost of living and stagnant wages have done little...

This text demonstrates how businesses and institutions continue to operate outside the ecological carrying capacity of the environment, and highlights the need for participation and social innovation on their part. It asserts that senior executives and...

The 2016 US election was ugly, divisive, maddening, and influential. In this provocative new book, Paul Booth, Amber Davisson, Aaron Hess, and Ashley Hinck explore the effect that everyday people had on the political process. From viewing candidates as...

The intentional spread of falsehoods - and attendant attacks on minorities, press freedoms, and the rule of law - challenge the basic norms and values upon which institutional legitimacy and political stability depend. How did we get here? The...

The Volatility Curse examines the conditions under which economic voting can (and cannot) function as a mechanism of democratic accountability, challenging existing theories that are largely based on experiences in developed democracies. Drawing on...

The United States is entering a new era of progressive state citizenship, with California leading the way. A growing number of states are providing expanded rights to undocumented immigrants that challenge conventional understandings of citizenship as...

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...

As the holders of the only office elected by the entire nation, presidents have long claimed to be sole stewards of the interests of all Americans. Scholars have largely agreed, positing the president as an important counterbalance to the parochial...

Latin America was one of the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of what has come to be known as the judicialization of politics - the use of law and legal institutions as tools of social contestation to curb the abuse of power in government, resolve...

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...

The Constitution grants Congress the power 'to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises'. From the First Congress until today, conflicts over the size, role and taxing power of government have been at the heart of national politics. This book...

Smith argues that citizenship creation and expansion is a pivotal part of political contestation in Africa today. Citizenship is a powerful analytical tool to approach political life in contemporary Africa because the institutional and structural reforms...

This Companion provides a broad, historically informed introduction to the study of the US constitutional system. In place of the usual laundry lists of cases, doctrines, and theories, it presents a picture of the constitutional system in action, with...

Plurality-led congresses are among the most pervasive and least studied phenomena in presidential systems around the world. Often conflated with divided government, where an organized opposition controls a majority of seats in congress, plurality-led...

Nationalism has generated violence, bloodshed, and genocide, as well as patriotic sentiments that encourage people to help fellow citizens and place public responsibilities above personal interests. This study explores the contradictory character of...

This book offers an analytical explanation for the origins of and change in property institutions on the American frontier during the nineteenth century. Its scope is interdisciplinary, integrating insights from political science, economics, law and...

The book provides a clear assessment of the New Labour public policies and their outcomes in Britain under the leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 1997-2009. Authors Florence Faucher-King and Patrick Le Gales argue that New Labour, in contrast...

Despite talk of a "naked public square," religion has never really lost its place in American public life. As the twenty-first century opened, it was re-emerging in unexpected and paradoxical ways. Religious institutions were considered for...

This book develops the concept of the corporatist catch-all party to explain how the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has responded to changing demands from women over the past forty years. Otto Kirchheimer's classic study argues that when...

Who should have the last word on fundamental policy issues? This book analyzes the rise of two contenders - the people, through direct democracy, and the courts. Now available in nearly half the states, direct democracy has surged in recent decades...

Congressional representation requires that legislators be aware of the interests of constituents in their districts and behave in ways that reflect the wishes of their constituents. But of the many constituents in their districts, who do legislators in...

The concept of precedent is basic to the operation of the legal system, and this book is a full-length empirical study of why US Supreme Court justices have chosen to alter precedent. It attempts to analyse those decisions of the Vison, Warren and Burger...

Traditional theories of American political development depict the American state as a thoroughly liberal state from its very inception. In this book, first published in 1992, Karen Orren challenges that account by arguing that a remnant of ancient...

Although there is a widespread belief that uneven voter turnout leads to biased outcomes in American democracy, existing empirical tests have found few effects. By offering a systematic account of how and where turnout matters in local politics, this...

The Republic of Cyprus' social and political culture is deeply partitocratic, with a close relationship between state apparatus and the parties that influence the government's decisions. However, little is known about the social and political...

There's no question that Americans are bitterly divided by politics. But in Partisans and Partners, Josh Pacewicz finds that our traditional understanding of red/blue, right/left, urban/rural division is too simplistic. Wheels-down in Iowa that most...

Over the nearly four decades it has been in print, Reason in Law has established itself as the place to start for understanding legal reasoning, a critical component of the rule of law. This ninth edition brings the book's analyses and examples up to...

US immigration policy has deeply racist roots. From his rhetoric to his policies, President Donald Trump has continued this tradition, most notoriously through his border wall, migrant family separation, and child detention measures. But who exactly...

'What a welcome gift!' John Clark, Project Director, UN Secretary-General's Panel on UN-Civil Society Relations. 'This book truly breaks new ground in the field of civil society studies by introducing an innovative assessment tool which can be of use...

A critical analysis of the post-Rio consensus on environment and development which questions the role of particular forms of internationalized elite scientific expertise. It asks why certain understandings of environmental change stick with such tenacity...

At the start of the 21st century, fighting poverty and protecting the environment are two of the most urgent challenges facing the international community. Environmental changes will jeopardize people's survival to an even greater extent in the future,...

This study looks at environmental problems from the perspective of the victims. The bottom line consequences are often damaging to the health of individuals or communities and they raise a wide range of issues concerning justice, international and...

How do some dictatorships become institutionalized ruled-based systems, while others remain heavily personalist? Once implemented, do executive constraints actually play an effective role in promoting autocratic stability? To understand patterns of...

Going all the way back to the time of George Washington, much of what we see and hear in the political world consists of lies and deceptions. Despite assurances to the contrary, politics is not about truth, justice, and principle. It is about money,...

Djupe and Gilbert investigate the political influence of church and how membership in organized religious bodies shapes the political life of members. Djupe and Gilbert's goal in this inquiry is to re-center scholarly attention on the voluntary...

The democratic ideal demands that the citizenry think critically about matters of public import. Yet many Democrats and Republicans in the United States have fallen short of that standard because political tribalism motivates them to acquire, perceive...

What do Americans want from immigration policy and why? In the rise of a polarized and acrimonious immigration debate, leading accounts see racial anxieties and disputes over the meaning of American nationhood coming to a head. The resurgence of...

The field of social movement studies has expanded dramatically over the past three decades. But as it has done so, its focus has become increasingly narrow and 'movement-centric'. When combined with the tendency to select successful struggles for study,...

With limited authority over state lawmaking, but ultimate responsibility for the performance of government, how effective are governors in moving their programs through the legislature? This book advances a new theory about what makes chief executives...

Alexandra Hennessy examines an area of Europeanization that has been largely ignored by political analysts: the development of an internal market for workplace pensions. This book offers an analysis of what is at stake in workplace pension reforms,...