The politics of gun policy in the United States are dramatic. Against the backdrop of daily gun violence—which claims more than 33,000 lives per year—gun control groups push for stronger regulations, while gun rights groups resist infringements upon their Second Amendment rights. To illuminate the dynamics of this polarized debate, Warped Narratives examines how and why interest groups frame the gun violence problem in particular ways, exploring the implication of groups’ framing choices for policymaking and politics. Melissa K. Merry argues that the gun policy arena is warped, and that both gun control and gun rights organizations contribute to the distortion of the issue by focusing on atypical characters and settings in their policy narratives. Gun control groups emphasize white victims, child victims, and mass shootings in suburban locales, while gun rights groups focus on self-defense shootings, highlighting threats to “law-abiding” gun owners. In reality, most gun deaths are the result of suicide. Homicides occur disproportionately in urban areas, mainly affecting racial minorities. While warping makes political sense in the short term, it may lead to negative, long-term consequences, including constraints on groups’ ability to build broad-based coalitions and to reduce prospects for compromise. To demonstrate warping, Merry analyzes nearly 67,000 communications by 15 national gun policy groups between 2000 and 2017 collected from blogs, emails, Facebook posts, and press releases. This book is the first to systematically assess the role of race in gun policy groups’ framing and offers the most comprehensive examination to date of interest groups’ presentation of this issue.
Warping Time shows how narratives of the past influence what people believe about the present and future state of the world. In Benjamin Ginsberg and Jennifer Bachner’s simple experiments, in which the authors measured the impact of different stories their subjects heard about the past, these “history lessons” moved contemporary policy preferences by an average of 16 percentage points; forecasts of the future moved contemporary policy preferences by an average of 12 percentage points; the two together moved preferences an average of 21 percentage points. And, in an Orwellian twist, the authors estimate that the “history lessons” had an average “erasure effect” of 8.5 percentage points—the difference between those with long-held preferences and those who did not recall that they previously held other opinions before participating in the experiment. The fact that the past, present, and future are subject to human manipulation suggests that history is not simply the product of impersonal forces, material conditions, or past choices. Humans are the architects of history, not its captives. Political reality is tenuous. Changes in our understanding of the past or future can substantially alter perceptions of and action in the present. Finally, the manipulation of time, especially the relationship between past and future, is a powerful political tool.
The colossal figures who shaped the politics of industrial America emerge in full scale in this engrossing comparative biography. In both the depth and sophistication of intellect that they brought to politics and in the titanic conflict they waged with each other, Roosevelt and Wilson were, like Hamilton and Jefferson before them, the political architects for an entire century.
All previous efforts to treat the philosophies and programs of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Freedom have been partial and episodic. Now John Milton Cooper reconstructs in parallel lines the entire range of their ideologies and their struggles—their social identification in terms of class, education, and regional roots; the origins and evolution of their political thought; their party leadership roles; and their psychological characters.
After tracking the shared identities of young manhood, Cooper explains the conflict of their mature years that developed from opposing philosophies of government. Not until 1912, when Wilson ran for president, did they come together partially and briefly on common practical grounds of reform of the political process and efforts to curb big business in the public interest. Later, foreign policy in particular pitted them in a deeper conflict that consumed the rest of their lives.
Hava Rachel Gordon compares the struggles and successes of two very different youth movements: a mostly white, middle-class youth activist network in Portland, Oregon, and a working-class network of minority youth in Oakland, California. She examines how these young activists navigate schools, families, community organizations, and the mainstream media, and employ a variety of strategies to make their voices heard on some of today's most pressing issuesùwar, school funding, the environmental crisis, the prison industrial complex, standardized testing, corporate accountability, and educational reform. We Fight to Win is one of the first books to focus on adolescence and political action and deftly explore the ways that the politics of youth activism are structured by age inequality as well as race, class, and gender.
What is the purpose of the West Bank Wall? Since Israel began its construction in 2002, it has sparked intense debate, being condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice. Israel claims it is a security measure to protect Israeli citizens from terrorist attacks. Opponents point to the serious impact on the rights of Palestinians, depriving them of their land, mobility and access to health and educational services.
In The West Bank Wall, Dolphin explores the Palestinian experience of the Wall and places the debate in its international context. Dolphin's writing is informed by his work for the UN, where for three years he monitored and compiled reports on the Wall's impact on the humanitarian conditions in refugee camps, towns and villages. With an introduction by Graham Usher, who has worked as Palestine correspondent for major international publications including the Economist, Middle East International, al Ahram English Weekly, the Guardian and Le Monde Diplomatique, this book puts the purpose of the Wall to the test.
What are the real intentions behind the Israeli security argument? Is it a means of securing territory permanently through an illegal annexation of East Jerusalem? Ray Dolphin provides some answers, offering a unique critical account of the impact of the wall and how it affects plans for a Palestinian state and for future peace in the Middle East.
The age of austerity has brought a new generation of protesters on to the streets across the world. As the economic crisis meets the environmental crisis, millions fear what the future will bring but also dare to dream of a different society.
What We Are Fighting For tries to answer the question that the mainstream media loves to ask the protesters. The first radical, collective manifesto of the new decade, it brings together some of the key theorists and activists from the new networked and creative social movements. Contributors include Owen Jones, David Graeber, John Holloway, Nina Power, Mark Fisher, Franco Berardi Bifo and Marina Sitrin.
Chapters outline the alternative vision that animates the new global movement – from 'new economics' and 'new governance' to ‘new public’ and 'new social imagination'. The book concludes by exploring 'new tactics of struggle’.
Contributors. Sheri Berman, James Cronin, Jean-Michel de Waele, Arthur Goldhammer, Christopher Howard, Jane Jenson, Gerassimos Moschonas, Sofia Pérez, Jonas Pontusson, George Ross, James Shoch, Sorina Soare, Ruy Teixeira
"A must-read for scholars across a broad sweep of disciplines. Laurel Weldon weaves together skillfully the theoretical strands of gender equality policy, intersectionality, social movements, and representation in a multimethod/level comparative study that unequivocally places women's movements at the center of our understanding of democracy and social change."
---Amy G. Mazur, Washington State University
"Laurel Weldon's When Protest Makes Policy expands and enriches our understanding of representation by stressing social movements as a primary avenue for the representation of marginalized groups. With powerful theory backed by persuasive analysis, it is a must-read for anyone interested in democracy and the representation of marginalized groups."
---Pamela Paxton, University of Texas at Austin
"This is a bold and exciting book. There are many fine scholars who look at women's movements, political theorists who make claims about democracy, and policy analysts who do longitudinal treatments or cross-sectional evaluations of various policies. I know of no one, aside from Weldon, who is comfortable with all three of these roles."
---David Meyer, University of California, Irvine
What role do social movements play in a democracy? Political theorist S. Laurel Weldon demonstrates that social movements provide a hitherto unrecognized form of democratic representation, and thus offer a significant potential for deepening democracy and overcoming social conflict.
Through a series of case studies of movements conducted by women, women of color, and workers in the United States and other member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Weldon examines processes of representation at the local, state, and national levels. She concludes that, for systematically disadvantaged groups, social movements can be as important---sometimes more important---for the effective articulation of a group perspective as political parties, interest groups, or the physical presence of group members in legislatures.
When Protest Makes Policy contributes to the emerging scholarship on civil society as well as the traditional scholarship on representation. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with advancing social cohesion and deepening democracy and inclusion as well as those concerned with advancing equality for women, ethnic and racial minorities, the working class, and poor people.
S. Laurel Weldon is Professor of Political Science at Purdue University.
As the confusion over the ballots in Florida in 2000 demonstrated, American elections are complex and anything but user-friendly. This phenomenon is by no means new, but with the weakening of political parties in recent decades and the rise of candidate-centered politics, the high level of complexity has become ever more difficult for many citizens to navigate. Thus the combination of complex elections and the steady decline of the party system has led to a decline in voter turnout.
In this timely book, Martin Wattenberg confronts the question of what low participation rates mean for democracy. At the individual level, turnout decline has been highest among the types of people who most need to have electoral decisions simplified for them through a strong party system--those with the least education, political knowledge, and life experience.
As Wattenberg shows, rather than lamenting how many Americans fail to exercise their democratic rights, we should be impressed with how many arrive at the polls in spite of a political system that asks more of a typical person than is reasonable. Meanwhile, we must find ways to make the American electoral process more user-friendly.
The party whips are essential components of the U.S. legislative system, responsible for marshalling party votes and keeping House and Senate party members in line. In The Whips, C. Lawrence Evans offers a comprehensive exploration of coalition building and legislative strategy in the U.S. House and Senate, ranging from the relatively bipartisan, committee-dominated chambers of the 1950s to the highly polarized congresses of the 2000s. In addition to roll call votes and personal interviews with lawmakers and staff, Evans examines the personal papers of dozens of former leaders of the House and Senate, especially former whips. These records allowed Evans to create a database of nearly 1,500 internal leadership polls on hundreds of significant bills across five decades of recent congressional history.
The result is a rich and sweeping understanding of congressional party leaders at work. Since the whips provide valuable political intelligence, they are essential to understanding how coalitions are forged and deals are made on Capitol Hill.
Contributors. Rey Chow, Zhiyuan Cui, Michael Dutton, Gan Yang, Harry Harootunian, Peter Hitchcock, Rebecca Karl, Louisa Schein, Wang Hui, Wang Shaoguang, Xudong Zhang
A New Statesman Book of the Year
“America’s greatest historian of democracy now offers an extraordinary history of the most bizarre aspect of our representative democracy—the electoral college…A brilliant contribution to a critical current debate.”
—Lawrence Lessig, author of They Don’t Represent Us
Every four years, millions of Americans wonder why they choose their presidents through an arcane institution that permits the loser of the popular vote to become president and narrows campaigns to swing states. Congress has tried on many occasions to alter or scuttle the Electoral College, and in this master class in American political history, a renowned Harvard professor explains its confounding persistence.
After tracing the tangled origins of the Electoral College back to the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Keyssar outlines the constant stream of efforts since then to abolish or reform it. Why have they all failed? The complexity of the design and partisan one-upmanship have a lot to do with it, as do the difficulty of passing constitutional amendments and the South’s long history of restrictive voting laws. By revealing the reasons for past failures and showing how close we’ve come to abolishing the Electoral College, Keyssar offers encouragement to those hoping for change.
“Conclusively demonstrates the absurdity of preserving an institution that has been so contentious throughout U.S. history and has not infrequently produced results that defied the popular will.”
—Michael Kazin, The Nation
“Rigorous and highly readable…shows how the electoral college has endured despite being reviled by statesmen from James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson to Edward Kennedy, Bob Dole, and Gerald Ford.”
—Lawrence Douglas, Times Literary Supplement
If Barack Obama had not won in Iowa, most commentators believe that he would not have been able to go on to capture the Democratic nomination for president. Why Iowa? offers the definitive account of those early weeks of the campaign season: from how the Iowa caucuses work and what motivates the candidates’ campaigns, to participation and turnout, as well as the lingering effects that the campaigning had on Iowa voters. Demonstrating how “what happens in Iowa” truly reverberates throughout the country, five-time Iowa precinct caucus chair David P. Redlawsk and his coauthors take us on an inside tour of one of the most media-saturated and speculated-about campaign events in American politics.
Considering whether a sequential primary system, in which early, smaller states such as Iowa and New Hampshire have such a tremendous impact is fair or beneficial to the country as a whole, the authors here demonstrate that not only is the impact warranted, but it also reveals a great deal about informational elements of the campaigns. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this sequential system does confer huge benefits on the nominating process while Iowa’s particularly well-designed caucus system—extensively explored here for the first time—brings candidates’ arguments, strengths, and weaknesses into the open and under the media’s lens.
Since its first appearance fifteen years ago, Why Parties? has become essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the nature of American political parties. In the interim, the party system has undergone some radical changes. In this landmark book, now rewritten for the new millennium, John H. Aldrich goes beyond the clamor of arguments over whether American political parties are in resurgence or decline and undertakes a wholesale reexamination of the foundations of the American party system.
Surveying critical episodes in the development of American political parties—from their formation in the 1790s to the Civil War—Aldrich shows how they serve to combat three fundamental problems of democracy: how to regulate the number of people seeking public office, how to mobilize voters, and how to achieve and maintain the majorities needed to accomplish goals once in office. Aldrich brings this innovative account up to the present by looking at the profound changes in the character of political parties since World War II, especially in light of ongoing contemporary transformations, including the rise of the Republican Party in the South, and what those changes accomplish, such as the Obama Health Care plan. Finally, Why Parties? A Second Look offers a fuller consideration of party systems in general, especially the two-party system in the United States, and explains why this system is necessary for effective democracy.
“Lively and delightful…zooms in on the faces in the crowd to help us understand both the depth and the diversity of the women’s suffrage movement. Some women went to jail. Others climbed mountains. Visual artists, dancers, and journalists all played a part…Far from perfect, they used their own abilities, defects, and opportunities to build a movement that still resonates today.”
—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
“An intimate account of the unheralded activism that won women the right to vote, and an opportunity to celebrate a truly diverse cohort of first-wave feminist changemakers.”
—Ms.
“Demonstrates the steady advance of women’s suffrage while also complicating the standard portrait of it.”
—New Yorker
The story of how American women won the right to vote is usually told through the lives of a few iconic leaders. But movements for social change are rarely so tidy or top-heavy. Why They Marched profiles nineteen women—some famous, many unknown—who worked tirelessly out of the spotlight protesting, petitioning, and insisting on their right to full citizenship.
Ware shows how women who never thought they would participate in politics took actions that were risky, sometimes quirky, and often joyous to fight for a cause that mobilized three generations of activists.
The dramatic experiences of these pioneering feminists—including an African American journalist, a mountain-climbing physician, a southern novelist, a polygamous Mormon wife, and two sisters on opposite sides of the suffrage divide—resonate powerfully today, as a new generation of women demands to be heard.
The assumptions that military service helps candidates attract votes—while lacking it harms a candidate’s chances—has been an article of faith since the electoral coronation of George Washington in 1789. Perhaps the most compelling fact driving the perception that military service helps win votes is the large number of veterans who have held public office. Some candidates even exaggerate their military service to persuade voters. However, sufficient counter-examples undermine the idea that military veterans enjoy an advantage when seeking political office.
In Why Veterans Run, Jeremy Teigenexplains the tendency of parties to elevate those with armed forces experience to run for high office. He describes the veteran candidate phenomenon by examining the related factors and patterns, showing why different eras have more former generals running and why the number of veterans in election cycles varies. With both quantitative and qualitative analysis, Why Veterans Run investigates each postwar era in U.S. electoral history and elaborates why so many veterans run for office. Teigen also reveals how election outcomes with veteran candidates illuminate the relationship between the military and civilian spheres as well as the preferences of the American electorate.
Never before has the idea of democracy enjoyed the global dominance it holds today, but neoliberalism has left the practice of democracy in deep crisis.
Marianne Maeckelbergh argues that the most promising model for global democracy is not coming from traditional political parties or international institutions, but from the global networks of resistance to neoliberal economics, known collectively as the Alter-globalisation movement. Through extensive ethnography of decision-making practices within these movements, Maeckelbergh describes an alternative form of global democracy in the making.
Perfect for activists and students of political anthropology, this powerful and enlightening book offers radical changes.
Newly updated to examine Hillary Clinton's formidable 2008 presidential campaign, Women for President analyzes the gender bias the media has demonstrated in covering women candidates since the first woman ran for America's highest office in 1872. Tracing the campaigns of nine women who ran for president through 2008--Victoria Woodhull, Belva Lockwood, Margaret Chase Smith, Shirley Chisholm, Patricia Schroeder, Lenora Fulani, Elizabeth Dole, Carol Moseley Braun, and Hillary Clinton--Erika Falk finds little progress in the fair treatment of women candidates. The press portrays female candidates as unviable, unnatural, and incompetent, and often ignores or belittles women instead of reporting their ideas and intent. This thorough comparison of men's and women's campaigns reveals a worrisome trend of sexism in press coverage--a trend that still persists today.
In Women's Activism and Feminist Agency in Mozambique and Nicaragua, Jennifer Leigh Disney investigates the contours of women’s emancipation outside the framework of liberal democracy and a market economy. She interviews 146 women and men in the two countries to explore the comparative contribution of women’s participation in subsistence and informal economies, political parties and civil society organizations. She also discusses military struggles against colonialism and imperialism in fostering feminist agency to provide a fascinating look at how each movement evolved and how it changed in a post-revolutionary climate.
Insightful and provocative, Women’s Activist Organizing in US History draws on both classic texts and recent bestsellers to reveal the breadth of activism by women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Contributors: Daina Ramey Berry, Melinda Chateauvert, Tiffany M. Gill, Nancy A. Hewitt, Treva B. Lindsey, Anne Firor Scott, Charissa J. Threat, Anne M. Valk, Lara Vapnek, and Deborah Gray White
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