New Books in Public Policy

Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford UP, 2014), by UC Berkeley Professor of Rhetoric Marianne Constable, impels its readers to reassess the dominant methods of considering what is law. Constable’s study of law is informed by both philosophy and sociology; however, she avoids common approaches employed by both disciplines and instead conducts her legal analysis by searching for dir...

John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen are the authors of The National Origins of Policy Ideas: Knowledge Regimes in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark (Princeton University Press, 2014). Campbell is the Class of 1925 Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and professor of political economy and the Copenhagen Business School. Pederson is professor of comparative political economy a...

Josh Lerner is the author of Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics (MIT Press, 2014). Lerner earned his Ph. D. in Political Science from The New School for Social Research, and is now the Executive Director of The Participatory Budgeting Project, a nonprofit organization that empowers communities to decide how to spend public money. Lerner asks the quest...

Judith Kelley is the author of Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works, and Why It Often Fails (Princeton University  Press, 2012). Kelley is associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. Monitoring Democracy, which won the Co-Winner of the 2013 Chadwick F. Alger Prize from the International Studies Association, has numerous theoretical...

Thomas A. Bryer joins the podcast to discuss his book Higher Education Beyond Job Creation: Universities, Citizenship, and Community (Lexington Books 2014). Dr. Bryer is the director of the Center for Public and Nonprofit Management University of Central Florida (UCF) and associate professor in the university’s School of Public Administration. Should the goal of higher education simply be about jo...

Darren Halpin is the author of The Organization of Political Interest Groups: Designing Advocacy (Routledge 2014). Halpin is associate professor and reader in Policy Studies, and the Head of School of Sociology, at the Research School of Social Sciences, the Australian National University. He is also co-editor of the journal Interest Groups and Advocacy and the Foundation Series Editor for the boo...

From 1945 to the mid-1970s, the rate at which Americans went to and graduate from college rose steadily. Then, however, the rate of college going and completion stagnated. In 1980, a quarter of adult Americans had college degrees; today the figure is roughly the same. What happened? In her book Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (Basic Books, 2...

Most people say “I’m sorry” a lot. After all, we make a lot of mistakes, most of them minor, so we don’t mind apologizing and expect our apologies to be accepted or at least acknowledged. But how many of our apologies are what might be called “strategic,” that is, designed to do nothing more than placate the person we have wronged and essentially exonerate ourselves? In other word, how many of our...

The mid-’00s saw the rise of a political movement in Europe concerned with technocratic impositions on the ideals of free culture, privacy, government transparency and other technology policy issues. Led by online file sharers and developers, the Swedish Pirate Party was thrust into the spotlight in 2006 after law enforcement shut down the popular file sharing site The Pirate Bay. In his new book,...

David C. Berliner, Gene V. Glass, and associates are the authors of 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools: The Real Crisis in Education (Teachers College Press, 2014). Dr. Berliner is Regents’ Professor of Education Emeritus at Arizona State University. Gene V Glass is a senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center and professor at the University of Colorado. The as...

When we discuss the death penalty we usually ask two questions: 1) should the state be in the business of killing criminals?; and 2) if so, how should the state put their lives to an end? As Austin Sarat shows in his fascinating book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford University Press, 2014), these two questions are intimately related. The reason is prett...

Earlier this spring, I drove to a small beaver pond near my home in Colorado, snapped together my fishing rod, and cast a silver lure into the pond’s crystalline waters. Within twenty minutes, I’d caught dinner: a pair of glittering rainbow trout, olive backs spattered with a constellation of black spots. The fish were gorgeous, and, roasted with oil and garlic, would prove delicious. But, having...

Olivier Zunz is the author of Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton University Press 2014). The paperback addition of the book has recently been published with a new preface from the author. Zunz is Commonwealth Professor of History at the University of Virginia. The book tracks the origins of philanthropy in America as a pact between the very rich and reformers. This was a movement that b...

Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumptions of scientific research, and guide us to reliable sources of information on which to base our policies and opinions. Jane Maienschein‘s new book is a model of the kind of careful, balanced, and beautiful...

Why do we feel guilty–and sometimes hurt ourselves–when we harm someone? Why do we become angry–and sometimes violent–when we see other people being harmed? Why do we forgive ourselves and others after a transgression even though “the rules” say we really shouldn’t? In his fascinating book The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Judge Morris B. Hof...

Emery Roe is the author of Making the Most of Mess: Reliability and Policy in Today’s Management Challenges (Duke UP 2014). Roe is senior associate with the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Roe’s book navigates between economics, ecology, and public policy. He challenges the notion that all messes are bad, and points to how public administrations c...

The constitution guarantees Americans freedom of religious practice and freedom from government interference in the same same. But what does religious liberty mean in practice? Does it mean that the government must permit any religious practice, even one that’s nominally illegal? Clearly not. You can’t shoot someone even if God tells you to. Does it mean, then, that religious liberty is a sort of...

Dr. Amy Stambach is the author of Confucius and Crisis in American Universities: Culture, Capital, and Diplomacy in U.S. Public Higher Education (Routledge, 2014). Dr. Stambach is a lecturer in Comparative and International Education at University of Oxford. Dr. Stambach’s book, a part of the Education in Global Context series, offers an ethnographic look at the partnership between American univer...

Kevin Dougherty and Vikash Reddy are the authors of Performance Funding for Higher Education: What Are the Mechanisms What Are the Impacts (Jossey-Bass, 2013). Dr. Dougherty is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Education Policy at Teachers College-Columbia University and Mr. Reddy is a Senior Research Assistant at the Community College Research Center. In their book, the authors explore...

  In early America, the practice of “warning out” was unique to New England, a way for the community to regulate those who might fall into poverty and need assistance from the town or province. Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) is the first book about this forgotten aspect of colonial Massachusetts life since 1911. We peramb...

Jim Russell is a sociologist and it was his encounter with the hidden realities of his own 401(k) retirement plan that touched off his crusade to demystify for himself, and then others, just what was at stake in the options presented by private and public retirement plans. In Social Insecurity: 401(k)s and the Retirement Crisis (Beacon Press, 2014), he puts into plain language for ordinary America...

It may seem silly to ask why we seek ecstasy. We seek it, of course, because it’s ECSTASY. We are evolved to want it. It’s our brain’s way of saying “Do this again and as often as possible.” But there’s more to it than that. For one thing, there are many ways to get to ecstasy, and some of them are very harmful: cutting, starving, and, of course, drug-taking. These things may render an ecstatic st...

Denise Brennan‘s second book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States (Duke University Press, 2014), examines how individuals who were trafficked into forced labor go about rebuilding their lives afterward. Through her ethnography of lived experience and her analysis of immigration policy, Brennan shows that trafficking and forced labor are common byproducts of our cap...

Americans are very politically divided. Democrats say we need a more powerful welfare state while Republicans say we need to maintain the free market. The struggle, we are constantly informed, is one of ideas. And that it is in the worst possible sense, for neither the Democrats nor Republicans seem interested in evidence. They don’t want the facts to get in the way of their arguments. In his rema...

The paleontologist Michael Benton describes a mass extinction event as a time when “vast swaths of the tree of life are cut short, as if by crazed, axe wielding madmen.” Elizabeth Kolbert‘s new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt, 2014), explores the five major mass extinction events that have occurred on the Earth over the last half billion years. Kolbert contrasts these...