New Books in Political Science

Why do some countries pass legislation regulating carbon or protecting the environment while others do not? In his new book Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics (MIT Press, 2020), Matto Mildenberger (Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara) uses a comparative analysis of Norway, Australia, and the United States to explain differ...

What does the 1964 presidential election have to teach us about party dynamics, civil rights and polarization? While many scholars have treated the dramatic candidates and characters such as Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater, Nancy Beck Young’s Two Suns of the Southwest: Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the 1964 Battle between Liberalism and Conservatism (University of Kansas Press, 2019) ...

If gun violence kills so many Americans, why don’t we see more effective solutions? How much does the way we frame an issue impact how we feel about it? How often are hot button issues deeply polarized due to the biased or intentionally manipulated ways they are presented to the public? In Warped Narratives: Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Melissa K. M...

How do the political afterlives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. continue to shape American democracy? How does a common myth of opposition distort our understanding of civil rights? In his dual biography, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (Basic Books, 2020), Peniel E. Joseph (Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values at th...

In his new book Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (Sarah Crichton Books, 2019), District Judge Richard M. Gergel asks pertinent questions for the Summer of 2020. How do tragic events awaken white people to the violence of structural racism? What do white people do about it? How do black leaders shape the...

Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon (University of Michigan Press, 2019) illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally ed...

Kara Moskowitz, Assistant Professor of African History as the University of Missouri-St. Louis. has written a terrific book, Seeing Like A Citizen: Decolonization, Development and the Making of Kenya, 1945-1980 (Ohio University Press). Kara’s book is rigorously researched and beautifully written. She draws on both archival and life history methods to center rural Kenyans, living (or who have lived...

The question of how a state decides what its official language is going to be, or indeed whether it even needs one, is never simple, and this may be particularly true of China which covers a continental landmass encompassing multitude of different language families and groups. Indeed, what is even meant by “Chinese” is unclear when one considers the huge range of related but mutually unintelligibl...

Terrorism and radicalization came to the forefront of news and politics in the US after the unforgettable attacks of September 11th, 2001. When George W. Bush famously asked "Why do they hate us?," the President echoed the confusion, anger and fear felt by millions of Americans, while also creating a politicized discourse that has come to characterize and obscure discussions of both phenomena in t...

The "guard is tired." With that simple phrase, the newly installed Bolshevik regime in Russia dismissed the duly elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918. And, one might say, so started Russia's century-long interference in elections and electoral outcomes. In his new book Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference (Knopf, 2020), David Shimer narrates in me...

Today I spoke with Professor Peter J. Boettke, co-author of Public Governance and the Classical-Liberal Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2019) with Paul Dragos Aligica and Vlad Tarko. Dr Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, at George Mason University, USA. In our conversation...

In her nuanced case study of postemanciaption Virginia, Nicole Myers Turner, (Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University) challenges assumptions regarding the intersection between black religion and politics in this “signal moment of political and cultural transformation in the African-American experience.” Using traditional archival records from churches, political institutions a...

In a time of contentious debate over Confederate monuments, Nicole Maurantonio (Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication studies and American Studies at the University of Richmond) provides an intriguing look into how revisionist ideas of the Confederacy have seeped into mainstream culture. Based in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, she is well-positioned to comment on the...

When you ask people about academic collaborations, Piven and Cloward is almost always the first one they mention. In this episode of the Co-Authored podcast, we look at the four-decade collaboration between Professors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. This collaboration is incredibly timely today, as protest and social movements are at the center of debates about racial justice and social equ...

For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In her deeply reported investigation, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: this is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all...

Many of us have stacks of cookbooks on our shelves, which we look through for ideas and inspiration, or to transport us to distant places with different foods, smells, experiences, and sometimes memories of our visits. Kennan Ferguson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, argues that there is more going on in those cookbooks than just recipes. In fact, Cookbooks...

College courses in Ethics tend to focus on theories of the moral rightness or wrongness of actions. This emphasis sometimes obscures the fact that morality is a social project: part of what makes a decent and stable society possible is that we uphold standards of conduct. We call out bad behavior, blame wrongdoers, and praise those who do the right things. We apologize and forgive in public ways. ...

What brought about an end to the Cold War has long been a subject of speculation and mythology. One prominent argument is that the United States simply bankrupted the Soviet Union, outspending the Soviets on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or "Star Wars"). Renowned Soviet and Russian scholar, Professor Archie Brown in his latest work rejects any simple answers. In The Human Factor: Gorbache...

70 years ago, the philosopher Theodore Adorno and a team of scholars released a massive book titled The Authoritarian Personality (Verso, 2019), which attempted to map the psychological and emotional dynamics of those who might find themselves seduced by authoritarianism. The book synthesized both empirical psychology and sociology, relying on massive sets of data, with psychoanalytic models of pe...

As Indonesia nears the 75th anniversary of its proclamation of independence this year, the socio-political debates surrounding her birth as a nation-state take on contemporary salience. In Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2019), Kevin W. Fogg analyzes the religious aspirations that motivated many Muslim revolutionaries to fight the return of Dutch after the Second World War and envisi...

Should we understand the conservative elites of #Never Trump as homogeneous and united? Failed renegades? Moral guardians of republicanism and values? In their new book Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites (Oxford University Press, 2020), Robert P. Saldin (Professor of Political Science at the University of Montana) and Steven M. Teles (Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins...

One of the most enduring ideas in economics is that unemployment is both unavoidable and necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy. This assumption has provided cover for the devastating social and economic costs of job insecurity. It is also false. In this The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity, 2020), Pavlina R. Tcherneva challenges us to imagine a world where the phantom of unemployment...

Over the last couple of decades, a number of books written both by the academics and journalists  have appeared on many dysfunctions of the Pakistani state, a few of them even predicting why and how and when it is going to collapse. Against this grain, Ayesha Siddiqi’s new book, In the Wake of Disaster Islamists, the State and a Social Contract in Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is a f...

In the lead-up to every election cycle, pundits predict that Latino Americans will overwhelmingly vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. And it’s true—Latino voters do tilt Democratic. Hillary Clinton won the Latino vote in a “landslide,” Barack Obama “crushed” Mitt Romney among Latino voters in his reelection, and, four years earlier, the Democratic ticket beat the McCain-Palin ticket by a ma...

People’s Tribunals, Human Rights and the Law (Routledge, 2020) gives a vital introduction to an essential but overlooked topic; the rise of People’s Tribunals, their role in truth and justice, and the contribution they make to redress the rights of survivors and victims. People’s Tribunals are independent, grassroots movements, growing from civil society which address past atrocities in spaces whe...