New Books in American Politics

Political commentator Matt K. Lewis warns his fellow conservatives that their movement is going off the rails in Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump (Hachette, 2016). Lewis chafes at the populist, protectionist and nativist elements that have come... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since it was published in 2016, Arlie Russell Hochschild‘s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016) has been many times heralded as necessary reading for our current political moment. For her perceptive and dramatic account of a Berkeley sociologist’s exploration of Tea Party enthusiasm in coastal Louisiana, Dr. Hochschild received honors and awar...

When first enacted at the start of the twentieth century, primaries were to decrease the power of party bosses to dominate the choice of who ran for office. Primaries were a feature of the progressive agenda to limit political corruption and democratize party politics. One hundred years later, party organizations remain powerful arbiters of candidate selection. Candidates who aren’t backed by the...

American Cicero: Mario Cuomo and the Defense of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a compelling exploration of the political life of Governor Mario Cuomo as well as the concepts of American liberalism, presidential politics, our understandings of governors in the United States, and the geographic and political shifts that transpired during the latter half of the twentieth centu...

Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2016) is an important analysis of both congressional and presidential power, and how these two branches interact, especially within polarized political periods. Reflecting the way this book examines both of these branches of government and the exercise of their respective powers, Investigating the...

Marie Griffith‘s new book Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic Books, 2017) offers a portrait of how religious views regarding sexuality became entangled with multiple political debates including those over feminism, gay rights, sex education and in charges of communism and secular humanism. Beginning with the controversies over birth control in...

Do we live in a country of red and blue states or something more purple-ish? The red state/blue state meme of 2000 has really never gone away, and scholarly debate, as well as frequent media attention, has argued for its merits and demerits. Are we a sharply divided and polarized nation or simply one divided by electoral rules that exacerbate relatively small partisan differences? In David A. Hopk...

In our hyper polarized world, it is easy to assume that this is a natural state of being, the result of natural shifts in politics. In Sam Rosenfeld‘s new book, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), he argues otherwise. Rosenfeld takes us back to the 1940s when another crisis of polarization dominated the headlines. Instead of too much, scholar...

Prior to the wave of protests in 2017 supporting immigrants in the US, there were the protests of 2006. That spring, millions of Latinos and other immigrants across the country opposed Congressional action hostile to immigrants. These protesters participated in one of the largest movements to defend immigrant and civil rights in US history. In Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization,...

Gregory Laski approaches the concept of democracy in his text, Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2018) from a variety of dimensions and perspectives, integrating the concept of temporality to considerations of liberty and justice within an analysis of American political thought and history, especially in the period following the Civil War. Laski’s...

In the wake of the Alabama Senate election in December, 2017, attention has been drawn to the intersection of religion and politics. This is the subject of God at the Grassroots 2016: The Christian Right in American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), co-edited by Mark Rozell and Clyde Wilcox. Rozell is the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Wilcox i...

Much attention has been drawn to the role of white women in the recent Alabama senate election and the earlier election of Donald J. Trump as president. Today’s racial and gender politics have long historic roots, according to Elizabeth McRae, the author of Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Gillespie McRae is an associat...

What is it about Black Republicans that makes them fodder for comedy? How do Black Republicans view their participation in their political group? Corey D. Fields answers these questions and more in his new book, Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans (University of California Press, 2016). Using interviews and ethnographic data, Fields investigates how...

In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the ‘worst of the worst.’ The 1976 decision ushered in the ‘modern’ period of the US death penalty, resulting in the execution of over 1,400 inmates, with over 8,000 individuals currently sentenced to die. Each chapter...

Catapulted into the Oval Office by an unusual set of circumstances, Gerald Ford remains a unique figure in American presidential history. In Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party: A Political Biography of Gerald R. Ford (University Press of Kansas, 2017), Scott Kaufman recounts the life and career of this often misunderstood leader. He sees the roots of Ford’s political ideology in his Michigan youth, w...

In From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction (University of Missouri Press, 2017) , Forrest Nabors sets out to show that congressional Republicans regarded the work of Reconstruction in the same way they regarded the work of the Founders: as regime change, from monarchy in the one case and from oligarchy in the other, to republicanism. Nabors examines the writings and speec...

Andrew R. Lewis is the author of the new book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Lewis is assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati and is the book review editor at the journal of Politics & Religion. Following up on recent podcasts with Daniel Bennett and Christopher Bayl...

Christopher Baylor is the author of First to the Party: The Group Origins of Political Transformations (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Baylor is an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. Based on substantial archival research, Baylor’s book positions interest groups at the center of what makes parties change. Using the case of civil rights organizations and the Demo...

Over the course of a public career that stretched from the Washington administration to the Mexican-American War, John Quincy Adams became a living link to America’s revolutionary generation. In The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics (Liveright, 2017), William J. Cooper describes how Adams held fast to the values of that generation during a time of...

This week on the podcast, Daniel Bennet joins us to talk about his new book, Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement (University Press of Kansas, 2017). Bennett is assistant professor of political science at John Brown University. From Hobby Lobby to Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court has ruled on controversial social policy issues. At the center of many of...

Timothy LaPira and Herschel Thomas are the authors of Revolving Door Lobbying: Public Service, Private Influence, and the Unequal Representation of Interests (University Press of Kansas, 2017). LaPira is associate professor of political science at James Madison University; Thomas is assistant professor of political science at University of Texas, Arlington. What is the consequence of the rapid spi...

The New Americans? Immigration, Protest, and The Politics of Latino Identity (University Press of Kansas, 2017) by Heather Silber Mohamed weaves together a number of different strands within the discipline of Political Science in context of the diverse Latino community in the United States. Silber Mohamed integrates analysis of social identity and citizenship, social movements and protest politics...

Before Transgender actors entered popular culture, and before the “T” was included in LGBT, Transgender activism was a small and marginalized movement. However, though courage and perseverance, Transgender rights began to enter the public consciousness. Drawing on her own life story, Riki Wilchin’s newest book TRANS/gressive: How Transgender Activists took on Gay Rights, Feminism, the Media & Cong...

Nathan Kalmoe and Donald Kinder are the authors of Neither Liberal or Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Kalmoe is an assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University and Kinder is the Philip E. Converse Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. Neither Liberal or Conservative looks str...

William Davenport Mercer‘s Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) argues that if we want to understand how Americans in the early Republic viewed the sources of their rights, we need look no further than the mud at the bottom of Baltimore harbor. In the early nineteenth century, two men, John Barron, Jr. and...