Daniel Stedman Jones is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). The book tells a portion of the intellectual history of neoliberalism through a focus on the period of the 1950s through the 1980s. Stedman Jones tracks the development of a set of ideas by Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and later Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James Buchanan, first in Europe and then in the United States. This intellectual movement soon becomes a transatlantic political movement, as the leaders of the neoliberal agenda sought to influence policy makers in the UK and US. Policy making in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly deregulation and other market-based reforms, reflected the success of the “masters of the universe” to move beyond the academy. The book ends with a reflection on the legacy of neoliberalism in current times. Scholars in political science, public policy, history, and economics would all benefit from the story Stedman Jones tells about the relationship between the history of ideas, politics, and policy. The book was short-listed for the Royal Historical Society, Gladstone Prize.

Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich are authors of the provocative new book, The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies (Rowman and Littlefield 2013). Dr. Tienken is an assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Services at Seton Hall University, and is also currently the editor of the American Association of School Administrators Journal of Scholarship and Practice and the Kappa Delta Pi Record. Dr. Orlich is professor emeritus of education and science instruction at Washington State University, Pullman. Their new book is an unabashed critique of nearly five decades of school reform and the questionable assertions and arguments made by many advocates for standardization, nationalization, and corporatization of public schools. They refer to the famed “Sputnik” moment of the 1950s as a manufactured crisis that Bon Jovi might call a “vagabond king wearing a Styrofoam crown”. They call A Nation at Risk, the landmark study of educational performance in US schools, “an intellectually vapid and data challenged piece of propaganda” and the current federal law, No Child Left Behind, “Stalinist-inspired”. Deep down, this book is a critique of the neoliberal theory of government applied to education. Tienken and Orlich argue that standardization, testing, and charter schools have been foisted upon local school in deference to neoliberalism, rather than in service of students. They suggest that better policies can better improve education.

A few highlights from the podcast interview.

On Sputnik and Bon Jovi: “Bon Jovi and Sambora have a song off the album, These Days, and the song is called These Days, and in that song they use phrase “vagabond king wearing a Styrofoam crown”. And I heard that phrase and it struck me: yes, that really sums up Sputnik in one phrase, Sputnik is the really the genesis of the school bashing and the current school reform movement. Everyone refers to it as if it was a meaningful event in terms of school reform.”

On A Nation at Risk: “When you read A Nation at Risk, we challenge anyone to go ahead and find the actual data to support the claims and conclusions they draw.”

On federal education policy: “Under Obama and the Republicans in terms of the Common Core State Standards and new national testing initiatives, so really for the first time in this country’s history, curriculum is being determined by a small group of elites far away from your kids’ and my kids’ schools. That is problematic culturally but also educationally.”

Muzammil Hussain and Phillip Howard have authored Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013) which explores the role social media (Twitter, Facebook, and texting) have played in political activism in Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon.  Hussain is a new Assistant Professor of Global Media Studies at the University of Michigan and Phillip Howard is Professor of Communication, Information, and International Studies at the University of Washington. Through extensive data collection and fieldwork, the authors bring a multi-method and multi-disciplinary approach to their timely subject. They argue that digital activism typically travels through six steps of protest mobilization starting with capacity building and ends with post-protest information war. This is the third book from the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series featured on the podcast. As with the previous, Political Scientists can learn a lot from the disciplinary perspective brought to the subject of activism from those in Communications.

Cyril Ghosh is Visiting Assistant Professor at Wagner College where he teaches courses in American government, political theory, and immigration. His new book, The Politics of the American Dream: Democratic Inclusion in Contemporary American Political Culture (Palgrave-MacMillan 2013), explores the development and meaning of this powerful national myth. Ghosh tracks the historical development of the American Dream and answers important questions about its conflicted meaning in contemporary politics. Candidates for public office often evoke the American dream, but Ghosh argues that these evocations are rarely consistent and the definitions often in conflict with each other. Ghosh is an enthusiastic author. His prose reflects an eagerness to share what he has learned, resulting in an enjoyable and accessible read.

[Cross-posted from New Books in African American Studies] German military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz observed that many of the important variables in war exist in ‘clouds of great uncertainty’ which create disconnects and confusion that persist even after the fighting has ended. The conflict between the Black Panther Party and the United States government is in ways illustrative of this phenomenon–or ‘the fog of war’ as it has come to be called–and helps explain why the Party is so well known yet misunderstood.

For many, the Black Panther Party exists in image fragments: bullet-pocked storefronts, raised fists, drawings of mutant-pig policemen, Huey P. Newton on a wicker throne. For others, it exists in biographies of its leaders: Revolutionary Suicide, Seize the Time, This Side of Glory, A Taste of Power, just to name a few. Historians and political theorists have weighed in as well exploring the excesses of COINTELPRO, the failures of party leaders, gender inequity, missed opportunities, failed alliances, and endless betrayals. Yet there is still much to learn. In Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (University of California Press, 2013),  authors Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin do an excellent job of putting the movement in its historical and philosophical context as not merely a challenge to American racism, but to American empire.

Joshua was kind enough to speak to us about his book. I hope you enjoy.

Moises Naim is the author of The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be (Basic Books, 2013). Dr. Naim served as the Minister of Finance in Venezuela, the Executive Director of the World Bank, and Editor of Foreign Policy magazine. He is now Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As such, Dr. Naim writes as a scholar, practitioner, and witness to global change over the last three decades.

His new book explains how major trends in business, politics, and society are displacing traditional centers of power and creating new micropowers. Revolutions are changing political institutions, but also the structure of power in the financial, cultural, and religious sectors. The breadth and depth of the book result in a powerful description of the complex world in which we now live.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] When I went to college long ago, everyone had to read Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). I think I read it in half-a-dozen classes. Today Marx is out.  Benedict Anderson, however, is in. You’d be hard-pressed to get a college degree without reading or at least hearing about his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). That book says, in a phrase, that nations were invented, and quite recently at that.

The trouble is that according to Azar Gat, Anderson is wrong. In his new book Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Gat musters a significant amount of evidence suggesting that humans are more-or-less hardwired for kin and ethnic preference–we’ve always liked people who look, talk and act like “us” more than “strangers” because we are built to do so. We didn’t “invent” the nation; it was–and remains–in us. Moreover, he shows that the historical record itself makes clear that something like nations have been with us since the state appeared 5,000 years ago. To be sure, their form has; but they were always around. This is important for the way we think about the world today. Marx thought classes were going to disappear  They didn’t. Anderson and those who follow him seem to think that nations are going to disappear. They aren’t.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Big Ideas] Most people think that professors are more liberal, and some much more liberal, than ordinary folk. As Neil Gross shows in his eye-opening Why are Professors Liberal and Why do Conservatives Care? (Harvard UP, 2013), “most people” are right: academia is much more left-leaning than any other major profession in the U.S . But why is this so? As Gross points out, there are a lot of “folk” explanations out there, but none of them holds much water. Gross looks the data (a lot of which he collected himself) and searches for a more compelling explanation. It’s surprising: the fact that most college students think professors are liberal (which is true) makes those among them who are conservative think they wil not be welcomed in the profession (which, as it turns out, may not be true). By analogy, men don’t generally become nurses because they think of nursing as a “female” profession. Just so, conservatives don’t become professors because they think of academia as a “liberal” profession. But does it matter that academia is liberal? Listen in and find out.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Journalism] Robert W. McChesney, the celebrated political economist of communication, takes the Internet, industry and government head-on in his latest book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (The New Press, 2013).

Digital Disconnect builds on McChesney’s previous works, spinning forward his scholarship to construct a remarkably current look at the Internet’s corporate and political landscape.

“Almost all of the other books on the Internet, some of which are very good, sort of try to take a larger view of it,” McChesney says during the interview. “Because of where I’m coming from, because of my interests, I think that’s the one thing I could inject that draws from my past research, where I can speak with greater authority, that’s really not talked about by anyone else.”

McChesney uses the book to argue that the Internet has become a hub of “numbing commercialism,” largely the result of failed government policies.

Writes McChesney: “When the dust clears on this critical juncture, if our societies have not been fundamentally transformed for the better, if democracy has not triumphed over capital, the digital revolution may prove to have been a revolution in name only, an ironic, tragic reminder of the growing gap between the potential and the reality of human society.”

Jeffrey Henig is the author of The End of Exceptionalism in American Education: The Changing Politics of School Reform (Harvard Education Press, 2013). Henig is Professor of Political Science and Education at Teacher’s College and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. In his book, he explains that much scholarship and commentary on school reform has been segmented and sporadic, overly focused on particular reforms, and thereby unable to fully explain the larger arcs of reforms overtime. The thesis of the book is that the shift from education governance based in single-sector institutions, such as elected school boards, to broad-based institutions, such as mayor controlled school systems, has not received the attention it deserves. In this way, the book fits neatly with previous books featured here by Jesse Rhodes and Sarah Reckhow. Henig goes about unpacking this change, the winners and losers, and the possible direction of future school reform. The book is deeply rooted in the political science literature, but also speaks to issues of public management, education policy, and social movements.

Marc Ambinder is the author, with D.B. Grady, of Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry (Wiley, 2013). He is a contributing editor at GQ and The Atlantic magazine, and has served as White House Correspondent for National Journal. His new book investigates executive power and the role secrets play in US policy making. He weaves together eye-opening stories with a larger meditation on transparency and open government. His story toward the end of the book about a Secret Service accidentally shooting at and missing the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while he entered a vehicle in New York, has already drawn considerable interest for what it may say about the relationship between the Bush Administration and Iran. Why wasn’t that secret ever leaked?

Sarah Reckhow is the author of Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics (Oxford University Press 2013). Reckhow is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. Her book probes significant questions about the role of philanthropic foundations in education reform. Through in-depth case studies of New York City and Los Angeles, Reckhow demonstrates how a particular view of school reform has been funded by major foundations such as Gates and Eli Broad. Emphasizing new types of schools, particularly charter schools, and reforms focused around a business-oriented view of school management, foundations have reshaped education in these two cities. Yet differences in governance that exist between the two cities also have resulted in a different role for funders and funding. Reckhow weaves together this story with novel data collection and excellent interviews. The book should be read by scholars in public policy, education, and nonprofit studies.

S. Laurel Weldon is Professor of Political Science, Purdue University, and Director of the Center for Research on Diversity and Inclusion. She is the author of When Protest Makes Policy: How Social Movements Represent Disadvantaged Groups (University of Michigan Press, 2011). The book provides a theoretical and empirical case for the relationship between women’s movements and social change. In a manner similar to Clifford Bob’s work on the Global Right Wing, Weldon’s expands the conversation about social movements to the international arena. She weaves together both cross-national and 50-state data to argue for ways to think about social movements that move beyond narrow studies of interest groups. The dot-connecting effort to bridge her strong theoretical arguments with these data, make the book a major contribution to the field of public policy. Weldon’s incorporation of social movement literature also is a contribution to political science literature, which has tended to shy away from engaging deeply in social movements.

Arend Lijphart is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past president of the American Political Science Association. In this interview, we discuss his book Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (Yale University Press, 2012), now in a newly updated edition. The book is an empirical study of power-concentration and power-sharing in 36 democracies around the world during the period 1945 to 2010. Professor Lijphart finds strong correlations between institutional arrangements, such as a country’s electoral system, and quantifiable aspects of democratic quality, including political and economic equality, governmental accountability, rates of incarceration, and gender equality. Patterns of Democracy has been called “controversial,” “magnificent,” and “the best-researched book on democracies in the world today.”

[Cross-posted from New Books in Terrorism and Organized Crime] The violence in Mexico is receiving a lot of media attention internationally. Paul Rexton Kan has produced a book that provides us with a comprehensive and comprehendible introduction to the background to the conflict and its effects. Cartels at War: Mexico’s Drug-Fueled Violence and the Threat to US National Security (Potomac Books, 2012) is a relatively short book packed with detailed information. The book covers the nature of the drug war, the cartels involved, the national and international responses and the effects of this war on the local and international communities. But this is not just a descriptive work. Kan provides us with his recommendations for solutions and predictions about the future of the conflict. In particular, he draws comparisons between treating this as an insurgency and spells out how a counter-terrorist response would not be the correct way to deal with the issue. This is high intensity crime and requires a high intensity policing response. Overall the book is an excellent introduction to the very complex drug war in Mexico, as well as being a source of practical and realistic policy options for addressing a conflict this large.

Daniel McCool, professor of political science at the University of Utah, is the editor of The Most Fundamental Right: Contrasting Perspectives on the Voting Rights Act (Indiana University Press, 2012). The VRA was one of the center pieces of the civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s. The Act aimed to address great inequities in access to and participation in voting, particularly among African Americans. Perhaps most controversially, the law labeled a handful of states that were deemed the most egregious violators of voting rights, and required them to gain pre-clearance from the Department of Justice on any changes in state voting procedures. Nearly fifty years later, is the case for the VRA still so pressing or are modifications or a complete overhaul called for? This timely collection provides deep theoretical and empirical justifications for the VRA, and equally well-developed arguments in opposition. One finished the collection more informed and a little unsure of what is called, both signs of a well-edited volume.

The timeliness of this book cannot be overstated. On Wednesday February 26, 2013, the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Voting Rights case of Shelby County v Holder.

Kristi Andersen is the author of New Immigrant Communities: Finding a Place in Local Politics (Lynne Rienner, 2010). Andersen is professor of political science at Syracuse University. Previous to her latest, she published After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics Before the New Deal and The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928-1936. Her latest book places a pressing issue of the day, how to fully incorporate newcomers into US society, in a political context. Rather than emphasize the individual, this book focuses on the group and the political resources immigrant groups possess, access, and are shut out from. The qualitative method focused on six cities captures a rich understanding of nuance and detail. Read along with other more quantitative analyses of the subject, the field of political science has been better able of late to grapple with the immigrant question. Andersen’s book is a highly recommended read.

Over the last year, this podcast has featured several authors who’ve examined the presidency of Barack Obama. John Sides, Daniel Kriess, and Enid Logan each wrote about the election campaign of the President. Michael P. Jeffries steps back and places the President into a larger theoretical conversation about race and language. Jeffries is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Welleseley College and also writes for The Atlantic magazine and The Guardian newspaper. He is the author of Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America (Stanford University Press, 2013) and published his first book, Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop in 2011. Jeffries peels back the debate over exactly “post-racial” life in America really is in 2013. Using the presidency of Barack Obama as a focal point, he draws from sociology, feminist theory, and political science to situate the president in long-standing debates about the state of race in America. The book is provocative, timely, and an enjoyable read

Andra Gillespie is the author of The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America (NYU Press, 2012). She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Emory University and earned her Ph.D. from Yale University. Her new book focuses on the rise of one of the most well-known mayors in the country, Cory Booker. Gillespie tracks Booker’s rise through the complex politics of the city of Newark, NJ. As one of the few US cities with a history of African American mayors, Booker’s story is unique, but also illustrative. By challenging long-time Mayor Sharpe James, Booker — a newcomer to the city — confronted a deep and protective political establishment. The strategies Booker used, some effective, others less so, help Gillespie explain a larger phenomenon of the “post-racial America”. The book’s clear and personal writing make this an engaging read for political scientists and those interested in urban politics.

Stephen Caliendo and Charlton McIlwain are the authors of Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in US Political Campaigns (Temple University Press 2011). Caliendo is Professor of Political Science at North Central College and McIlwain is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communications at New York University. The two present a complicated portrait of the way race has played a part in recent elections. They utilize a multi-method approach combining content analysis and experiments to analyze how race is presented in campaign advertisements and comment on the verbal and visual dimensions of race in advertising. The book can help make sense of past elections and also the way race may play a part in campaigns in the future.

Ines Mergel, assistant professor of public administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the School of Information Studies (iSchool) at Syracuse University, is the author of Social Media in the Public Sector: A Guide to Participation, Collaboration and Transparency in the Networked World (Jossey-Bass 2012). This timely and insightful book can be read by a host of audiences, from the scholar to the practitioner. The book relates the development of social media technologies to the open government movement of the last generation. It demonstrates how government agencies can better integrate tools such as Twitter and Facebook into their operations. In doing so, agencies can open a door to public input and deliberation. This is a book that should be read by political scientists interested in how federal agencies grown and change, but also by those in federal agencies who want to respond to calls for greater openness.

Scott Melzer is the author of Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War (New York University Press 2012). Scott earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside and now is an associate professor of Sociology at Albion College. His book adds to the growing list of scholarship on gun control and gun rights. Scott’s disciplinary background in Sociology contributes to a better understanding of the nature of the NRA’s members, the links between their views towards guns and other issues, and what lies ahead for the organization. Through in-depth interviews with NRA members, we learn more about what it means to be a part of this organization, something few scholars have addressed directly in the past. The book is both a great read about policy, about an influential interest group, but also about the sociology of an organization.

Thomas Holyoke has recently published Competitive Interests: Competition and Compromise in American Interest Group Politics with Georgetown University Press (2011). Tom is an Associate Professor of Political Science at California State University – Fresno. His book advances political science knowledge of the political process through an in-depth analysis of the role of interest groups. The book is based on interviews with nearly 90 lobbyists who have advocated on issues as varied as environmental policy to banking reform. The book contributes a rich empirical analysis supported by statistical models, but also a careful development of theory. Holyoke speaks to both the interest group audience and the wider field of American politics.

James Daily, J.D. and Ryan Davidson, J.D. are the co-authors of The Law of Superheroes (Gotham Books 2012). The book uses comic book scenarios, much as previous volumes on physics and philosophy, to answer questions such as “Would mutants have civic rights?” and “Could Batman patent the Batmobile?” The authors deftly combine their legal background with a keen sense of the comic book universe to introduce a variety of legal concepts in an approachable fashion. This humorous take on legal topics could easily fit into an introductory public law class or general education course on law and society.

John Sides and Lynn Vavreck are the authors of The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election (Princeton University Press, 2012-2013). I spoke with John about the pre-release of several chapters of the book in advance of the election. The innovative model of publishing this book is one of the interesting dimensions of this project. Rather than wait to publish the entire book after the election concluded in November, the authors committed to an ambitious plan to rapidly publishing the book nearly in real-time with the developments of the 2012 campaign. Two free digital chapters are now available at the publisher’s website and more are to come:  The book marshals an enormous amount of election and economic data to make predictions about the outcome of the Obama/Romney race. In addition, they dissect the party primaries and media coverage to dispel many political myths that dominate campaign punditry.

John is Associate Professor of Political Science at The George Washington University. Lynn Vavreck is Associate Professor of Political Science and Communication Studies at UCLA. John’s real-time opinions about the campaign can be read at: www.themonkeycage.org.

Lisa Garcia Bedolla and Melissa Michelson are the co-authors of Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming the Electorate through Get-Out-The-Vote Campaigns (Yale University Press 2012). Lisa is associate professor of social and cultural studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and Melissa Michelson is professor of political science at Menlo College. Their book takes up the challenge to better understand how effective voter mobilization efforts actually are. Using field experiments across California conducted in partnership with community organizations, they demonstrate what works and what doesn’t work to get ethnoracial voters out to the polls. The book can be read by scholars and practitioners alike who are interested in the civic engagement, political behavior, and democracy.

In Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Julietta Hua analyzes how discourse on human trafficking creates the boundaries of victimhood and thereby restricts concepts of punishment, remedy, and citizenship.  Analyzing legislation, public discourse, and interview materials, Dr. Hua traces how gender, nationality, and racial identities become inscribed into the concept of sex trafficking.  The subject matter is heavy, but Dr. Hua presents a delightfully rigorous theoretical framework, careful interpretation of proffered data, and poignant illustrations.

During a Presidential campaign when the ethnic background of many major national figures and immigration in general has weighed heavily on the debate, Wendy Roth’s new book, Race Migration: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race (Stanford University Press, 2012), offers many insights. Roth, a sociologist by training and on the faculty at the University of British Columbia, delves into the complex conceptions of race, ethnicity, and nationality both in the US and also in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. She compares the ways people living in each of those countries with migrants to New York City according to how they conceptualize race. She finds that a process of structural assimilation into US institutions, particularly education in US colleges and universities, explains how certain migrants take on the more binary and American views of race. There are numerous implications from this book for the study of race and politics. It can help political scientists better understand the political assimilation of immigrants and the ways that race has been constructed through forced measurement and methods of data collection.

Daniel Kreiss is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012) traces the integration of new media into the presidential campaigns of Howard Dean and then Barack Obama. Kreiss argues that by focusing on innovation, infrastructure, and organization, scholars can better understand how new media has become central to understanding political campaigns in the US. The book draws on dozens of interviews with most of the largely unknown, but integral members of the campaigns of Dean and Obama. The story Kreiss tells reveals much about the nature of modern political campaigns and how the Internet has shaped the last decade of American politics.

Clifford Bob is the author of the new book The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics (Cambridge University Press 2012). Bob is an associate professor of political science at Duquesne University. This new book draws on the rich literature on the politics of public policy making, but adapts them to the international arena. Bob argues that too little focus has been placed on right wing groups and their causes in favor of progressive movements. Part international relations, part comparative politics the book traces the competing policy networks in several countries in the areas of gay rights and gun rights. The book is provocative, readable, and a real contribution to a variety of subfields of political science.

David Karpf is the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy (Oxford University Press 2012) and an assistant professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. His book is timely, well-researched, and insightful. He explores the adoption of Internet technologies by advocacy groups in the early 2000s, specifically MoveOn, DailyKos, and Democracy for America. Karpf argues that these technologies are transformative and disruptive, permitting the establishment of whole new types of advocacy group based on low-cost, high-speed virtual mobilization and organizing. Readers from both the academic and professional political world would benefit from reading this book. Its conclusions suggest a radical change in the population of interest groups as we know it.

Isaac Campos is the author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Campos is an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His book traces the intellectual history of marijuana from Europe to Mexico and the ways in which usage of the drug was portrayed – as a source of madness and violence — in the Mexican media. Campos turns on its head the popular myth that drug regulation in Mexico derives from US sources. For political scientists and for all those interested in the issue, the book offers a deep historical context for the current “war on drugs” and related violence in the US and in Mexico.

Jesse Rhodes‘ book An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind (Cornell University Press, 2012). The book synthesizes nearly forty years of US political history. It tells the story of the development and passage of the No Child Left Behind law by George W. Bush. The book builds on political science theories of political entrepreneurship, institutionalism, and incrementalism to narrate the debate about education reform. Rhodes captures the people, the organizations, and the institutions that have defined education policy since the 1980s. The book is accessible, thorough, and a must read for scholars of education politics and policy.

Benjamin Wittes is senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and the editor of Campaign 2012: Twelve Independent Ideas for Improving American Public Policy (Brookings Institution Press 2012). He also directs the Campaign 2012 Project for Brookings.

This collection of essays on critical national issues ranges from the well-publicized, health care reform, to the wonkish, institutional reform. The book is arranged as a series of critical debates that reflect on the first four years of the Obama administration and ways to improve public policy. Authors include many luminaries in the field including: Thomas Mann, Alice Rivlin, and William Galston. The issues range from domestic, budget deficit and federalism, to international, Iran and Middle East policy. The book could be used in an undergraduate political science course on the election and public policy, but also is a serious evaluation of issues facing policy-makers.

Mitchel A. Sollenberger, assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Mark J. Rozell, professor of public policy at George Mason University, have co-authored the provocative The President’s Czars: Undermining Congress and the Constitution (University of Kansas Press, 2012). The book uses a public law methodology to study the evolving role so-called “czars” play in the presidency. Presidential czars, as they define them, are given policy making authority by the president, but are not confirmed by the Senate. Thus, they operate with little accountability to the legislative branch. Their existence, which increased in numbers and importance over the twentieth century, raises serious questions about their appropriateness and constitutionality. The book concludes with a set of recommendations to address these concerns and rebalance the relationship between the president and Congress.

Enid Logan‘s At this Defining Moment: Barack Obama: Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race (NYU Press, 2011) examines the campaign and politics around the election of Barack Obama from a sociological perspective. Drawing on a rich array of television, newspaper, and blogs, Logan challenges many of the conventional interpretations of the Obama victory. In trying to define the “new politics of race”, the book is a contribution to the field of political science, where scholars have also grappled with putting the first African American president into political, historical, and social context. One of the more compelling chapters of the book deals with the intersection of Hispanic and Asian Americans and the Obama campaign. The length, clear-writing, and salient topic should make this a considered adoption for many courses in American politics, race and politics, and campaigns/elections.

Matt Grossmann, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University, has authored the recently released book, The Not-So-Special Interests: Interest Groups, Public Representation, and American Governance (Stanford University Press, 2012). The book challenges scholarly and conventional notions of how interest groups influence the policy process. Grossman argues that the focus of political scientists on collective-action and free riding, which has dominated the field for decades, has overlooked the significant contributions of David Truman. In fact, Grossman argues, the few good predictions that Olson made were in general the same ones made by Truman.

The approach of the book is empirical and includes many statistical models, but the writing is clear and accessible to non-academics. It seeks to answer the question of why certain advocacy organizations are so visible in public debates, by foregrounding the prominence of Jews, lawyers, and gun owners. In one of the more interesting cases, Grossmann follows the formation and evolution of the AARP as the leading voice for seniors in Washington, and why conservative opposition groups have failed to challenge their influence over key policy issues. Grossman ends by offering a theory of Institutionalized Pluralism to explain the system of advocacy in the US today.

Hip-hop has, within a short time span, moved from a free-flowing expression of urban youth to a global–and highly marketable–musical genre.  Its influence in culture, fashion, film, and music is ubiquitous, and theories about hip-hop’s importance in the political sphere abound.  But what, exactly, is the relationship between hip-hop and politics?   Does hip-hop influence the expression and formation of political thought?  Does it influence the expression and formation of political action? If the influence exists, what are its boundaries?  These are some of the questions tackled in Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics by  Lester K. Spence.  Spence traces the concurrent neoliberal turn in hip-hop and American politics and examines the implications of both for the politics of black Americans. He infuses the narrative of neoliberal transformation with empirical examination of hip-hop’s impact on the political attitudes of  the hip-hop generation and of urban youth. Analyzing track lyrics, survey data, and original experiments, Spence theorizes the boundaries of the space in black American life that is occupied by both hip-hop and politics.

Marriage is at the center of some of our fiercest political debates. Here are some recent developments regarding marriage in the United States. Earlier this year, the Justice Department announced that it would no longer defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). A few weeks ago, New York became the largest state to allow same-sex marriage, joining five other states, the District of Columbia, and the Coquille and Suquamish Indian tribes in Oregon. The Senate Judiciary Committee has recently started to consider a bill that would grant federal benefits to same-sex married couples.

But to what extent should the state be involved at all in regulating or recognizing marriage? In her recent book, Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State, and the Case for Their Divorce (Princeton University Press, 2010), Tamara Metz argues for the “disestablishment” of marriage. Marriage, Metz argues, like religion, should be separated from the state. She further claims that the liberal state should only be in the business of legally recognizing a wide variety of intimate caregiving unions among consenting, able-minded, able-bodied, adult intimates. In this interview, she clarifies her position further.

In recent months, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk about filibustering in the Senate, about how Senate Democrats acquired a filibuster-proof majority in the 2008 elections only to lose it by the midterm elections of 2010 when Scott Brown was elected to replace Ted Kennedy. Filibustering has become the norm in the Senate, so much so that it is taken for granted that the Senate minority party will threaten filibustering more often than not. This has led Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to issue calls for reforming the filibuster process in order to make it more difficult for any minority party in the Senate to be obstructionist.

In a timely new book, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Gregory Koger explains the American filibuster, catalogs its use in the House and Senate, measures its impact, and finally theorizes why and how obstruction has been institutionalized in the Senate, particularly in the last 50 years.

In this interview he explains, among other things, the long pedigree of obstruction in the Senate, how and why filibustering became routinized, and why reform will not be easy.

Practically everyone thinks they understand what citizenship means. Yet, there is a great deal of conceptual ambiguity about the term and scholars studying citizenship often disagree about what citizenship actually entails, how it developed, and so on. In Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics (Cambridge UP, 2009), Elizabeth Cohen clarifies the idea of ‘semi-citizenship’ and thus helps clarify the concept. In doing so, she makes a series of provocative arguments.

Cohen argues that there are various categories of people who are neither full citizens and nor are they totally excluded from the polity. These semi-citizens, she claims, are present in every democracy and hold some but not all of the essential elements of citizenship. In making this argument, she disaggregates the concept of citizenship into the various kinds of rights it bestows. She goes on to show that every democratic polity includes members who are routinely denied certain rights while continuing to have others, even though these individuals may be recognized as full citizens in the eyes of the state. In addition, she claims that such semi-citizenships are an enduring and inevitable part of all democratic politics.

It is common to find in the scholarship on citizenship the tendency to make normative arguments for full inclusion into the polity. Yet, in this carefully and somewhat provocatively argued book, Cohen invites us to recognize that full inclusion for all members of a polity has never been the norm in liberal democracies. Nor is it always warranted. In this interview, Cohen explains to us why this is so.

[Crossposted from New Books in Sociology] Contemporary research into illiberal governments draws much inspiration from the writings of Hannah Arendt. In her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt claimed that Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia were not merely typical authoritarian regimes, but rather were despotisms of a new “totalitarian” sort. Arendt believed “totalitarianism” was entirely unprecedented, and she took the social sciences to task for failing to recognize it as such.

Peter Baehr is sympathetic to Arendt’s concern that social scientists too often put new wine in old bottles. In his latest book, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences (Stanford UP, 2010), Baehr explores the dialogue between Arendt and her social scientific critics, for example, David Riesman, Raymond Aron, and Jules Monnerot. What emerges is a more nuanced view of totalitarianism as well as an understanding of the difficulties the social sciences face when confronting that which appears to be “new.” Baehr points out that the struggle to comprehend true novelty is hardly over. How, he asks, should social scientists understand Islamic terrorism? Is it another brand of totalitarianism? Or is it–as Arendt said of totalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s–“unprecedented”?

[Crossposted from New Books in History] When I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In the book Montesquieu reduces a set of disparate, seemingly unconnected facts arrayed over centuries and continents into a single, coherent theory of remarkable explanitory power. Alas, grand theoretical books like Spirit of the Laws are out of fashion today, not only because the human sciences are gripped by particularism (“more and more about less and less), but also because we don’t train students to think like Montesqueiu any more.

In his excellent The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), Francis Fukuyama bucks the trend. Of course, he’s done it before with elegant and persuasive books about the fall of communism, state-building, trust, and biotechnology among other big topics. Here he takes on the emergence of modern political institutions, or rather three modern political institutions: the state, the rule of law, and accountable government. He begins with human nature, takes us through a massive comparison of the political trajectories of world-historical civilizations (Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, European), and, in so doing, tells us why the world political order looks the way it does today. His answers are surprising, and not directly in line with what might be called the “conventional thinking” about these things.

[Crossposted from New Books in History] In preparation for this interview I watched the documentary (that’s what the producers call it, anyway) “Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup.” Of course it’s absolutely loony. In fact, it’s so loony that I began to wonder if the director, Dylan Avery, wasn’t having us on. It’s hard to tell whether “Loose Change” is a you’ve-gotta-hear-this conspiracy theory or a tongue-firmly-in-cheek parody of a conspiracy theory. Maybe I’m just jaded, but it seems to me–particularly after reading David Aaronovitch’s excellent book Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in the Shaping of Modern History (Penguin, 2010)–that we’ve heard all this before: Satan’s children did it, the Freemasons did it, the Illuminati did it, the Jews did it, the the Commies did it, the Mafia did it, the John Birch Society did it, the Trilateral Commission did it, the Bilderberg Group did it, the Club of Rome did it, Skull and Bones did it, PNAC did it, and everyone else has done “it” whatever “it” happens to be. Every time one of these insidious plots “comes to light” it turns out to be a sickly-sweet cocktail of paranoia, anger, and don’t-let-the-facts-get-in-the-way-of-your-argument speculation. You’d think we’d have learned by now not to believe that “dark, hidden forces” are behind everything because, well, they demonstrably aren’t. But people want to believe these things, particularly when they seem to explain why something disturbing–say, the collapse of Germany in WWI, the high costs of rapid industrialization in the USSR in the 1930s, or America’s evident lack of preparation for 9/11–wasn’t “our” fault, but rather someone else’s. I would like to think that David’s wonderful book will put an end to loopy conspiracy theories so that we can get on with the important business of fixing things that matter. It probably won’t, but nonetheless Voodoo History is certainly a fine step in that direction and I applaud David for writing it (and you for reading it).

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] I have a friend who, as a young child, happened to meet Herbert Marcuse, by that time a rock-star intellectual and darling of the American student movement. Upon seeing the man, he exclaimed “Marcuse! Marcuse! You have such a beautiful head!” I don’t know how beautiful Herbert Marcuse’s head was, but I do know a lot of other interesting things about him and his Frankfurt School buddies now that I’ve read Thomas Wheatland’s wonderful The Frankfurt School in Exile (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). The story Tom tells casts the Frankfurt School in a new (and more correct) light. For one thing, Horkheimer, Adorno, and the rest really were hard-core empirical social scientists in the beginning, not “Critical Theorists” as we understand the term. They counted, measured, conducted surveys and did everything a positivist sociologist or economist would do. But, of course, that was not how they became idols of the New Left and the founders of “Critical Theory.” (Now that I think about it, almost no one ever achieves fame by doing empirical social science. See “Malcolm Gladwell” for more.) No, they–or rather Fromm, Marcuse and Habermas–got famous by telling young Americans that they were “repressed,” “alienated,” and “downtrodden” at exactly the moment they wanted to hear it, that is, the 1960s. You see, the “old” Marxism was dead; this was the “new and improved” version. In other words, they were in the right Critical-Theoretical place and at the right Critical-Theoretical time. And, as Tom points out, they were bewildered and even a bit disturbed by their fame. Despite what my friend said, Marcuse did not get a big head. Rather the opposite. He, much to his credit, told the students he didn’t want to be their guru, that he didn’t believe in gurus. But they didn’t care–they made him one anyway. Students love gurus. I loved Tom Wheatland’s book, and I encourage you to read it.

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] It’s one thing to say that the study of history is “relevant” to contemporary problems; it’s another to demonstrate it. In How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns (Princeton UP, 2009), Audrey Kurth Cronin does so in splendid fashion. She poses a common and very important question: what should we do about modern terrorism in general and Al-Qaeda in particular? To answer this query, she poses another (and quite original) question: how do terrorist campaigns usually end? The logic is simple and compelling: if we want to stop a terrorist campaign, we would do well to understand how terrorist campaigns generally stop. To do this, she reviews the history of modern terrorist campaigns, analyses the means by which they ended, and then presents an original typology of endings. With said typology, she can tell us what works in terms of anti-terrorism and what doesn’t in what circumstances. For example, her research shows that “decapitating” Al-Qaeda won’t work; other leaders will (and already have) sprung up to continue the terror campaign. Neither will negotiating with Al-Qaeda work because: a) there is no one to negotiate with and b) Al-Qaeda has no coherent list of demands. The cases Cronin examines suggest an entirely different approach, one that promotes the (already on-going) disintegration of Al-Qaeda from within. Al-Qaeda, Cronin says, is showing signs of imploding; we should just help it along.

This is a rich book and a model of how to use history for policy-making. I think I’ll send President Obama a copy.

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