New Books in American Politics

We’ve been focusing on the dynamics of democratic backsliding in the United States and beyond. In this episode of Postscript: Conversations on Politics and Political Science, Susan talks the co-founder and co-director of the Democratic Erosion Consortium, Dr. Robert Blair about how the Consortium offers FREE resources to teachers, students, journalists, policy makers, and any interested person – i...

Join us on Madison's Notes as we sit down with George Selgin, senior fellow and director emeritus of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Georgia. In this insightful conversation, Selgin unpacks the myths and realities of FDR’s New Deal through the lens of his book, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of R...

The ethics of the company in a highly politicized time. Businesses are increasingly social actors. They fund political campaigns, take stances on social issues, and wave the flags of identity groups. As a highly polarized public demands political alignment from the businesses where they spend their money, what's a company to do? Everyone's Business: What Companies Owe Society (University of Chicag...

The histories presented in Meeting the Moment: Inspiring Presidential Leadership That Transformed America  (SUNY Press, 2024) are of a select group of US presidents, their inspired leadership characteristics, and how they may inspire us today. The traits these presidents possessed were cultivated over a lifetime of lived experience and immortalized through the power of the presidential word-speech...

In this episode Licia Cianetti talks to Johannes Gerschewski about his book The Two Logics of Autocratic Rule (Cambridge UP, 2023). We discuss how autocrats try to either hyper-politicise or de-politicise their rule in order to stay in power, whether the word “fascist” is useful today, and what the two logics identified in the book might tell us about politics in contemporary autocratising democra...

Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones are joined by crypto journalist Matt Binder and longtime observer of U.S. politics and policy Edward Luce to explore the staggering wealth being generated by the Trump family’s crypto empire. We also hear from Sergei Sergienko, a crypto entrepreneur who has made and lost hundreds of millions in the crypto markets. Sergei has also faced down gangsters wh...

How to find hope in these times? I spoke with political scientist Loren Goldman about the principle of political hope: why we should have hope, how to have hope in dark times, and how political hope differs from naïve optimism, faith in progress, or passive reliance on a hidden logic that will save us in the end. Goldman, who is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsyl...

In this episode of Madison’s Notes, Michael McConnell examines the gap between the Founders’ vision of a limited presidency and today’s expansive executive power. Drawing on his book The President Who Would Not Be King (Princeton University Press, 2022), we discuss how the Constitution’s safeguards against monarchical authority have eroded over the past century—and what steps might restore balance...

Constitutional Conventions: Theories, Practices and Dynamics (Routledge, 2025) is an excellent edited volume exploring the various ways in which governments and constitutional structures operate in the spaces that are not necessarily articulated in law, edict, or formal documents. This is not a text about the folks who gathered together in 1787 in Philadelphia, or even those who wrote new constitu...

What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences? Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (Cambridge UP, 2025) surveys the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times. Quentin Skinner traces the understanding of liberty as independence from the classical ideal to early modern Britain, c...

Hosts Nina Dos Santos and Owen Bennett Jones explore the mounting political and financial pressures confronting higher education on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., it unpacks the unprecedented clash between the Trump administration and Harvard, raising broader questions about academic freedom, ideological conformity, and the role of government oversight. In the U.K., the conversation turn...

What has gone wrong with the left—and what leftists must do if they want to change politics, ethics, and minds. Leftists have long taught that people in the West must take responsibility for centuries of classism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other gross injustices. Of course, right-wingers constantly ridicule this claim for its “wokeness.”  In Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and...

American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government Post January 6 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) analyzes the roots of widespread disenchantment with American government. While blame often falls on the individuals in office, they are not operating in isolation. Rather they are working within a system designed by the Framers with one goal in mind, protectionism. Although the Fr...

How the United States' regulation of broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and data—together understood as “the cloud”—has eroded civil liberties, democratic principles, and the foundation of the public interest over the past century. Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (MIT Press, 2024) is a policy history that chronicles how the past century of regulating media...

The influence of partisan news is presumed to be powerful, but evidence for its effects on political elites is limited, often based more on anecdotes than science. Using a rigorous quasi-experimental research design, observational data, and open science practices, The House that Fox News Built?: Representation, Political Accountability, and the Rise of Partisan News (Cambridge UP, 2024) carefully...

At the 100 day mark of Donald Trump’s second term as president, the political scientists at Bright Line Watch released their 25th report on the state of American democracy entitled “Threats to democracy and academic freedom after Trump’s second first 100 days.” Based on polling both experts (760 political scientists) and the public (representative sample of 2000 Americans), the Bright Line Watch r...

A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 quickly became a landmark in the history of American environmentalism, helping to inspire the creation of both the Environmental Protection Agency and Earth Day. But what role did the history of Santa Barbara itself play in this? In Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920–1970 (U Chic...

One small town, two "thousand-year floods" in the span of two years: how does a community become resilient in the face of the ever-increasing risks of climate change? Small towns across America and around the world face mounting challenges with flood risk, a result of not only climate change but also poorly adapted landscapes, sprawl, overdevelopment and poor planning. After the Floods: The Search...

In My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America (Princeton University Press, 2025), Ruth Braunstein maps the contested moral landscape in which Americans experience and make sense of the tax system. Braunstein tells the stories of Americans who view taxpaying as more than a mundane chore: antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitimacy of the tax system, antiwar activists who resis...

In Banned: The Fight for Mexican American Studies in the Streets and in the Courts (Cambridge UP, 2025), readers are taken on a journey through the intense racial politics surrounding the banning of Mexican American Studies in Tucson, Arizona. This book details the state-sponsored racism that led to the elimination of this highly successful program, and the grassroots and legal resistance that fol...

Today, and for the past several years, many people both here and abroad have been trying to make sense of the radical right and its financial and ideological grip on the Republican party. Why is it that so many Americans have turned against democracy? What explains the authoritarian reaction of so many American citizens, even when that reaction works so directly against their basic interests? How...

Universities are under attack, but what exactly are the threats? How does free speech in the last 10 years compare to today? What do we stand to lose if higher education collapses? In this episode, Brandice Canes-Wrone dives into the major threats facing universities—from defunding to restrictions on free expression—and what we can do to solve them. We explore the history of universities, from the...

While veterans are often talked about, in Fight to Live, Live to Fight Veteran Activism after War: Veteran Activism after War (SUNY Press, 2019), Dr. Benjamin Schrader flips this this perspective by focusing on veterans telling their own stories. These veterans are not "broken" or "damaged and dangerous" from their experiences in war, rather they are active agents in their own healing and demilita...

On this edition of Ctrl Alt Deceit: Democracy in Danger, we are live at the Royal United Services Institute. Nina Dos Santos and Owen Bennett Jones are joined by a world-class panel to discuss the dangers posed by the waves of dark money threatening to overwhelm our democratic institutions. Panelists:--Tom Keatinge, Director, Centre for Finance and Security, RUSI--Darren Hughes, Chief Executive, E...

Since American president Donald Trump was elected to a second term, it is common to hear citizens, journalists, and public officials distinguish between the laws and leaders of their states and the national government. Those who oppose Trump’s policies with regard to reproductive rights, gun violence, LGBTQ+, education, police, and voting often present state constitutions, courts, laws, culture, a...