New Books in Political Science

The Party Decides is the most (only?) meme'd book in the history of political science. It's the one MTV called the biggest loser after the South Carolina primary in 2016. It is also a book of deep research, scholarship, and collaboration. This episode of the Co-Authored podcast focuses on the team of Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller. This group came together to write The Party...

Rwanda witnessed a 100-day mass genocide back in 1994, when the ethnic Hutu government and its supporters led a campaign that left around 800,000 people, including Tutsis and moderate Hutus, dead. And while, shockingly, the event was not given enough attention by the international community at the time, Rwanda’s genocide later led to reform and innovation in order to prevent and respond to such cr...

Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, in Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso), Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and sel...

“I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America. “I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. “I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that.” – Shirley Chisholm, January 25, 1972, Announcement of Run for the Presidency What i...

Jacob Mundy is associate professor of PCON at Colgate University He’s written a great book titled Libya, published in 2018 in Polity Presses' "Hot Spots in Global Politics" series. Jacob’s book is part-history, part-political science to guide readers through the intricate maze of foreign and Libyan actors and institutions that define modern day Libya. Mundy’s book is an accessible account of the c...

James Zogby’s The Tumultuous Decade: Arab Public Opinion and the Upheavals of 2010–2019 (Steuben Press, 2020) takes the reader on a decade-long tour of the Middle East as the region reverberates from popular revolts that toppled long-standing dictators, civil and proxy wars that sparked some of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, foreign interventions and seemingly intractable power struggles....

America's Inequality Trap (University of Chicago Press, 2020) focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and American politics. Nathan J. Kelly, Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, argues that the increasing concentration of economic power effects political power, thus allowing the gap between the rich and everyone else to become more acute and more rigid. T...

History matters in Russia. It really matters, so much so that the state has a "historical policy" to help legitimize itself and support its policy agenda. The Use of History in Putin's Russia (Vernon Press, 2020), James C. Pearce examines how the past is perceived in contemporary Russia and analyses the ways in which the Russian state uses history to create a broad coalition of consensus and forge...

Rancor reigns in American politics. It is possible these days to regard politics as an arena that enriches and ennobles? Matthew D. Wright responds with a resounding yes in his 2019 book, A Vindication of Politics: On the Common Good and Human Flourishing (UP of Kansas, 2019). Wright takes issue with the instrumentalist view of politics and walks readers through key debates in the field of natural...

"It used to be," soon-to-be secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright said in 1996, "that the only way a woman could truly make her foreign policy views felt was by marrying a diplomat and then pouring tea on an offending ambassador's lap." This world of US diplomacy excluded women for a variety of misguided reasons: they would let their emotions interfere with the task of diplomacy, they were not...

When most Westerners think of the Gulf, the first thing that comes to mind is often oil. However, as Adam Hanieh demonstrates in Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2018), the economies of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait are about more than just the “black gold.” Conglomerates...

Why is the scholarship and advocacy work of W.E.B. Du Bois so relevant for 21st century politics? Does his unique combination of both serve as a possible template for today’s freedom movements? Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly (assistant professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College and 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar with the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago...

Nearly everyone in the United States is aware of the fiery rhetoric and divisive political stratagems of Donald Trump and the contemporary Republican party. What many people forget, however, is that Trump is not the first Republican to rise to power by pushing incendiary policies and destroying opponents. Julian E. Zelizer, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, traces ma...

Over the past six decades, Henry Kissinger has been America's most consistently praised--and reviled--public figure. He was hailed as a "miracle worker" for his peacemaking in the Middle East, pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, negotiation of an end to the Vietnam War, and secret plan to open the United States to China. He was assailed from the left and from the right for his indifference t...

States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge University Press, 2020) theorizes the ways in which states that are presumed to be weaker in the international system use the International Criminal Court (ICC) to advance their security and political interests. Ultimately, the book contends that African states have managed to instrumentally and strategically use the in...

How did the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns affect other elections in 2016? How did the use of gender stereotypes and insulting references to women in the presidential campaign influence the way House and Senate candidates campaigned? The 2016 American elections forced scholars and candidates to reassess the role that gender plays in elections. In Trumping Politics as Usual: Masculinity, Misog...

What are the policy implications due to a fundamental distrust and dislike of “outsiders”? Today I talked to political scientist John R. Hibbing about his new book The Securitarian Personality: What Really Motivates Trump’s Base and Why It Matters for the Post-Trump Era (Oxford UP, 2020) Hibbing teaches political science at the University of Nebraska and has been both a NATO fellow in Science and...

In her new book, Contesting Conformity: Democracy and the Paradox of Political Belonging (Oxford University Press, 2020), political theorist Jennie C. Ikuta traces the idea of nonconformity and how this often-lauded idea can be a significant challenge for modern democracy, especially in the United States. The United States is often associated with the ideals of democracy, freedom, and individual l...

Lisa Levenstein is the Director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her current book They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties (Basic Books, 2020) shows how American feminists joined a global women’s movement for women’s rights as human rights. At home feminists e...

Democracy is a popular topic among scholars of politics in Southeast Asia. Liberalism is not. Or at least it hadn’t been up until the last few years, which have seen a spate of books with liberalism in the title: on Islam in Indonesia, capitalism in Singapore, post-colonialism in the Philippines, and now, Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar (Oxford University Press, 2018). In this new study, Roman...

How does the United States use immigration to suppress free speech? Should interests of “national security” take priority over individual liberties? What happens to democracy when the most vulnerable are denied their right to speak and exchange ideas? In Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2020), historian and lawyer...

Over the course of three decades of public service, Herbert Lehman dedicated himself tirelessly to advances the causes in which he believed. In Herbert H. Lehman: A Political Biography (SUNY Press, 2017), Duane Tananbaum describes his livelong public activism and the role Lehman’s relationships with key individuals played in shaping his political career. Tananbaum identifies the first of these as...

We’re all familiar with the statistic that 81% of white evangelical voters supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. But what if a deeper trawl through the complex relationship between religion and political activity in modern America suggests that statistic doesn’t really mean anything? In this exciting new book, John Compton, who serves as chair of the Department of Political Sci...

The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (MIT Press), by Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, demonstrates that this technology – which is mostly associated with covert surveillance and remote warfare – has also served as a vital tool for activists, social movements, and defenders of human rights to effect pro-social campaigns. Through stories of exemplar initiatives and analyses of thous...

This is our second podcast in a new series from New Books in Political Science called POST-SCRIPT in which Susan and I invite authors back to the podcast to react to contemporary political developments that engage their scholarship. Today’s podcast – recorded on Wednesday, August 12th (less than 24 hours after Democratic candidate Joe Biden announced Senator Kamala Harris as his Vice Presidential...