Democratic political adviser Peter Daou has long toggled between the world of presidential campaigns and online activism. He worked for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2008, and he has built a large social media presence with which he wages battles for progressive causes. Now he has channeled his experiences into Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace (Melville House, 2019), in which he analyzes the daily political skirmishing that rages online, urges progressives to engage on the “digital battlefield.” While acknowledging the deepening polarization of American politics, he argues that the polarization is “asymmetric,” with Republicans becoming more “extreme” than Democrats. And he warns against characterizing conservative “red America” as more reflective of the “real America” than the liberal “blue.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erin M. Kempker is an associate professor of history at Mississippi University for Women and the author of Big Sister: Feminism, Conservatism and Conspiracy in the Heartland (University of Illinois, 2018). The author examines how 1970s right-wing women activists in the state of Indiana combined earlier political conspiracy theories, Cold War anti-communism and anti-ERA sentiment to cast feminism as threat to American democracy, free enterprise, and the family. Conservative women’s groups in the mid-West, such as Minute Women and Pro America, rallied against the Equal Right Amendment at a critical moment for feminism. The strategy of the ERA Coordinating Committee, (HERA) a coalition of twelve liberal organizations, was of low-key bi-partisan lobbying of legislators that marginalizing radical feminists. The soft-sale approach of Hoosier feminists threatened to kill the ERA as it faced militant right-wing opposition. Kempker examines the motivations and organizational strategies of right-wing women and the problems feminist encountered in promoting ERA as a matter of simple justice and failing to directly counter the conservative critiques. Big Sister is a study of both conservative strategies that led to the rightward move of the Republican Party in the 1980s and the failings of feminists in delaying the ultimate passage of ERA in Indiana offering lessons for activist today. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steve Luxenberg has created an unusual history of the famous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and the 19th century’s segregationist practices in his book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation (Norton, 2019) It is unusual because it is chiefly an ensemble biography of Henry Brown, John Marshall Harlan, and Albion Tourgee, three men intimately connected with the Plessy case. The book covers the Antebellum period youth of the three men, each from a different part of the young nation and each encountering freedmen, slaves, and the institution of slavery in different social and political contexts. We follow these men through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the post-Reconstruction period leading up to the Plessy decision. The Plessy case helped solidify official, state-enforced segregationist practices throughout the United States. It made the now-infamous phrase “separate but equal” a constitutional doctrine that was the law of the land until the 1950s and 1960s. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor have written Rivalry and Reform: Presidents, Social Movements, and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor in the Department of Politics and a senior fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Tichenor is the Philip H. Knight Chair of Political Science and director of the Program on Democratic Engagement and Governance of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon. Rivalry and Reform explores the historical relationships between presidents and social movements. Through several cases, including Lincoln and abolitionism, Johnson and the civil rights movement, and Ronald Reagan and the New Christian Right, Milkis and Tichenor show that major political change happens through compromise between movement leaders and presidents negotiated over decades. The book concludes by focusing on Barack Obama’s approach to social movements such as Black Lives Matter, United We Dream, and Marriage Equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With at least one new billionaire in the 2020 presidential race, the politics of the one percent are with us again. What do billionaires believe? And do they believe the same things as the average American? Answering these questions has until now been frustrated by the difficulty of fielding surveys of the very rich. Just finding where they live is hard enough. But a new book has solved part of this problem and answers many questions. Benjamin I. Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J. Lacombe have written Billionaires and Stealth Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Page is the Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University; Seawright is professor of political science at the Northwestern University, and Matthew J. Lacombe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and is joining the faculty of Barnard College in the fall. In the book, we learn about the stealthy ways most billionaires participate in politics. They rarely utter a word about their beliefs in public, but do spend huge sums of money influencing politics. Unfortunately, only small amounts of that spending is publicly disclosed. Much of their spending is masked behind the non-transparent organizations that populate American politics. Stealthy politics, like the dark money groups that benefit, is a politics of secrecy and mystery, hardly the democratic politics of openness and transparency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (University of North Press, 2014), Margaret Peacock analyzes the various ways in which images of children were put to use, in Soviet and American Cold War propaganda. From the Boy Scouts to the Pioneers, ubiquitous images of children portrayed the superiority of communism/capitalism. Where children were used to showcase superiority, equally powerful were images of children as needing protection. In the United States, images of the child helped explain the need for nuclear testing and fallout shelters. From a Soviet point of view, children were likewise to be protected: from the evils of capitalist consumerism, from the rapacious nuclear warmongering of the West. Even as children were used to promote the officially sanctioned view of the American/Soviet state, those same images, Dr. Peacock shows, could be used to subvert that view. Post-Stalin Soviet films criticized the status quo using images of the child to do so. Suspect American mothers hauled in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities managed to subvert the aims of that body by hauling their children right along with them. Utilizing archival and published evidence from a wide variety of Russian and American sources, Dr. Peacock has written an engaging history of the uses to which images of children have been put, in service of a conflict that spanned at least half the last century and whose consequences remain with us. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yahoo! News Senior Political Correspondent Jon Ward delves into to the oft-forgotten yet starkly dramatic 1980 Democratic presidential primary between President Jimmy Carter and Senator Ted Kennedy in Camelot’s End: Kennedy vs. Carter and the Fight That Broke the Democratic Party (Twelve, 2019). Ward tracks the political origins of the southern moderate outsider and the northern liberal insider, and paints two complex and nuanced portraits. He explains how Carter had long eyed Kennedy as an obstacle to the presidency and how Kennedy eventually grew to view Carter as an obstacle to his policy agenda. The two deeply ambitious politicians would eventually clash on the biggest political stages and break apart the already weakening north-south coalition that had fueled Democratic Party dominance for decades. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who’s in, and who’s out? Professor Martha Jones explains the history of birthright citizenship, how Black Americans claimed the rights of citizens long before the courts and Congress granted them such legal rights, and why this prehistory matters to understand today’s debates. Is it outrageous that senior officials question the right of birthright citizenship? You may think so, but you’d also be wrong to think that this right has not been and will remain contested as long as the Republic stands. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan are authors of Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2019). Herd is a Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University; Moynihan is the inaugural McCourt Chair in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. In Administrative Burden, Herd and Moynihan show that the administrative burdens citizens regularly encounter in their interactions with government are not accidental, but the result of deliberate policy choices. With detailed descriptions of federal programs, the authors show that administrative burdens are essential to policy design. Regarding salient issues such as voter enfranchisement or abortion rights, lawmakers often use administrative burdens to limit access to rights or services they oppose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Traditionally Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign is remembered mainly for being the first time a Catholic was nominated as the candidate for a major political party. As Robert Chiles demonstrates in his book The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressivism, and the Coming of the New Deal(Cornell University Press, 2018), this focus obscures Smith’s efforts to promote a progressive reform agenda during the election and the role this played in forming the “New Deal coalition” in the 1930s. Chiles traces the emergence of Smith’s progressivism to his association with the women of the settlement house movement in the 1910s, through whom he gained a greater understanding of the problems facing urban workers. As both a state legislator and as governor Smith sought to promote reforms designed to improve the lives of New Yorkers on a range of issues, from workplace safety to environmental conservation. As the nominee Smith promoted a strong progressive agenda, one that appealed to many ethnic working-class voters in the Northeast and Midwest. These voters became an important source of electoral support for Smith’s successor as the Democratic presidential nominee, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who would realize much of Smith’s proposals after winning the White House in 1932. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton University Press, 2018), co-authors John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck explore the underlying question of American identity as a key component within the political landscape that was used during the 2016 primary and general election. Identity Crisis delves into the way that the Republican primary battle was shaped by this question of identity, specifically the ways in which candidate Donald Trump was able to leverage embedded tensions around social identity, especially in regard to issues like immigration. Through the use of substantial data sets that dive into voters’ choices over time, Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck are able to parse policy and issue preferences, how those choices coordinate with partisan inclinations and candidate selection, and what shifted during the course of the election cycle in 2015 and 2016. This incredibly compelling book, accessible to academics and non-academics, examines the tensions around American identity and what it means to be an American today, while exploring how that very idea is contested and seen through partisan lenses. The book examines not only an understanding of individual identity, but also the ways that group identity continues to contribute to further partisan cleavage and polarization. The authors also find interesting backlashes within this political dynamic, as responses to antagonistic attacks on certain groups prompts a variety of responses among voters. Identity Crisis will help readers understand what happened in 2016—from a variety of perspectives and considerations of different dimensions of American politics. This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While the campaign to win for women the right to vote in America was waged on a national scale, this often obscures the fact that the most of battles took place at the state level, where local perspectives were key. Sara Egge’s book Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870-1920 (University of Iowa Press, 2018) spotlights this by focusing on three counties in the states of Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota, charting the development of the campaigns for women’s suffrage there. As Egge explains, though women in the Gilded Age were expected to confine their activities to the private sphere, their involvement in community activities served as the basis for the assertion of their voting rights by signaling their willingness to assume the basic responsibilities of citizenship. By participating in local organizations and temperance campaigning women claimed a space in the public sphere, one upon which their successive efforts to win the suffrage in those states were built. This assertion of citizenship proved vital to the eventual success of the movement once the United States entered the First World War in 1917, as this civic activism served as a demonstration of loyalty proving that women deserved to exercise the right to vote. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It wasn’t always this way. From the Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership on natural resource conservation to Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ronald Reagan’s singing of the Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, Republicans have a proud tradition of environmental stewardship. Why have they seemingly abandoned it? That question animates The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Harvard University Press, 2018), a collaborative effort by acclaimed environmental historians James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg—who have produced an accompanying website for educators. They draw from the latest scholarship on the rise of postwar conservatism to explore how corporate interest groups, libertarian think tanks, evangelicalism, and the GOP power center’s shift southward and westward encouraged frustration with the broadly popular legislative achievements of the 1970s and resistance to mounting a similarly robust federal response to subsequent environmental problems. The authors explore the party’s shifting positions on the management of federal lands, the protection of air and water quality, and the mitigation of climate change. They observe how discourse prizing local control, prioritizing economic concerns, and questioning scientific expertise and international cooperation grew louder and louder and helped produce a political landscape where environmental issues are defined less by technical data and more by voters’ values. But party leaders’ anti-environmentalist rhetoric has often found them out of step with their constituents, and Republican administrations from Reagan to Trump have had to scale back their assaults on the environmental state. James Morton Turner is Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. His first book was the award-winning The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (University of Washington Press, 2012). Andrew C. Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. His previous books includes Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (Hill and Wang, 2013), Mining California: An Ecological History (Hill and Wing, 2005), and The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The expansion of democracy in 19th-century America transformed political campaigning in the country. As Mark R. Cheathem demonstrates in The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), nowhere was the change more dramatically seen than in the quadrennial election of a president. Prior to the 1820s, presidential campaigning was a limited affair reflecting the low level of popular engagement with the presidential selection process. This changed with the candidacies of Andrew Jackson, as his managers relied on a diverse range of tools to appeal to an increasingly engaged popular electorate. Through such means as parades, songs, and public correspondence, campaigns increasingly sought to rally their supporters to turn out and vote for the candidates. Though the Democrats pioneered such campaigns in Jackson’s successive bids for the White House, Cheathem shows how it was the Whigs which refined them to best effect in the presidential campaign of 1840, using these new tools to win the election that year for their nominee, William Henry Harrison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Following a historic election, we return again to the question of turnout. Who turned out in large numbers to shift power in the House back to the Democrats? What we know about the past is that there are substantial gaps in turnout between different groups. White Americans have turned out in larger numbers that many other racial and ethnic groups. This much is well-know, but what explains these gaps? Is it political interest, barrier to voting, or something else? Such is the focus of Bernard Fraga’s new book The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Fraga is assistant professor of political science at Indiana University. Fraga finds that the common explanations don’t always hold up when you examine rigorous data and use advanced methods. He argues for a theory of electoral influence based on the relative size of the racial and ethnic population in a voting district. In districts where minority groups make up a relatively small portion of the electorate, turnout tends to be low. In other districts, where the group makes up a larger portion, turnout tends to be much higher. These findings, and others, explain a lot about the 2018 election and future elections and campaigns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s been an article of faith among scholars and activists alike that poor Americans are ignored in national politics. But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong, and poor people, at least rhetorically, are in fact as commonly referred to by Presidents in their State of the Union addresses and in Party platforms as many other supposedly more favored groups? Kristina C. Miler’s Poor Representation: Congress and the Politics of Poverty in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2018) simultaneously gives the lie to these claims while offering rich new evidence to describe how and why most members of Congress fail to follow through on such rhetoric, even if they represent poor districts, and what we might do to remedy this imbalance. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2016, despite only mixed support from evangelical leaders, Donald Trump won an enormous share of the white evangelical vote. How did Trump manage to overcome the seeming mix-match between his record on social and moral issues and the longstanding views of evangelical voters? The authors and editors of The Evangelical Crackup?: The Future of the Evangelical-Republican Coalition (Temple University Press, 2018) offer a variety of answer. The book is edited by Paul Djupe, associate professor of political science at Denison University, and Ryan L. Claassen, a professor of political science at Kent State University. Paul joined the podcast to discuss the evolution of this interesting volume and what it says about the state of research on religion and politics, the Trump victory in 2016, and what the future holds for the relationship between religion, partisanship, and elections. Other contributors to the book include: Contributors include: Daniel Bennett, Mark Brockway, Ryan P. Burge, Brian R. Calfano, Jeremy Castle, Kimberly Conger, Daniel A. Cox, Kevin den Dulk, Sarah Allen Gershon, Tobin Grant, Robert P. Jones, Geoffrey Layman, Andrew R. Lewis, Ronald J. McGauvran, Joshua Mitchell, Juhem Navarro-Rivera, Jacob R. Neiheisel, Elizabeth Oldmixon, Adrian D. Pantoja, David Searcy, Anand Edward Sokhey, J. Benjamin Taylor, Robert Wuthnow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With many Americas fearing that democracy itself is in trouble, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent explores remedies to reserve the democratic decline in An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics (Custom House, 2018). Sargent first diagnoses the problem, arguing that democracy was in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Millenial generation, those born between the early 1980s and late 1990s, are the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in US history. They also grew up during the birth of the digital revolution and two cataclysmic events: September 11th and the Great Recession. What they believe has remained largely speculation, until the publication of The Politics of Millennials: Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America’s Most Diverse Generation (U Michigan Press, 2018) by Stella M. Rouse and Ashley D. Ross. In the book, Rouse and Ross discover the political and policy beliefs of Millenials through extensive survey and focus group research. They discover a generation deeply concerned about social issues, such as LGBTQ rights and drug legalization. On other issues, the findings suggest a moderate view on economic issues and a preference for a middle-ground approach by government on spending and taxation. Rouse is associate professor of government and politics and director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of Maryland; Ross is assistant professor in the Department of Marine Sciences and a fellow with the Center for Texas Beaches & Shores at Texas A&M University at Galveston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Teddy Roosevelt had one of the most colorful lives in the American history, but few have deeply explored his final years. Historian David Pietrusza does just that in TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy (Lyons Press, 2018), taking us through a period... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did American politics become so polarized? MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki points to clash of two larger-than-life characters in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, as the origin of our viciously tribal politics. In The Red and The Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism (Ecco, 2018), Kornacki traces... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is it possible for a president’s political appointees to rein in a president with a penchant for abusing power? Yes. Michael Koncewicz, who listened to hundreds of hours of the Nixon tapes, digs deep into the Richard Nixon presidency and shows exactly how Republicans put loyalty to the Constitution over... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There must be no middle ground on speech. In this episode I speak with Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and a Distinguished Professor of Law. He is the author of ten books, including The Case Against the Supreme Court (2014) and Closing the Courthouse Doors: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Where do these controversies start – a deep dive into American politics from the 1960s till today. Ian Haney López is Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent work engages the question of how racial divisions in society and growing wealth inequality in the United States are connected. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is "speech" the major underlying issue in recent Supreme Court decisions? Kate Shaw is Professor of Law at the Cardozo School of Law, a former Special Assistant to the President and Associate Counsel to the President in the White House Counsel’s Office. In this conversation, she speaks to Think About It about constitutional jurisprudence around speech, current developments in constitutional law, and the role of speech in recent SCOTUS rulings. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Interviewing one member of Congress is a feat for most researchers. Interviewing nearly 100 and almost every women member of Congress is remarkable. Even more remarkable is what we can learn from that data collection about the perceptions of women members of Congress, especially about the way they perceive recent partisan polarization and the changing role of gender, race, and ethnicity. Such is the exhaustive project of Kelly Dittmar, Kira Sanbonmatsu, and Susan J. Carroll, who are the authors of A Seat at the Table: Congresswomen’s Perspectives on Why Their Presence Matters (Oxford University Press, 2018). Dittmar is assistant professor of political science, Sanbonmatsu is professor of political science, and Carroll is professor of political science and gender studies, all at Rutgers University. If you want to know how members of Congress think and the ways that they view their work, you would be hard pressed to find a better book. Dittmar, Sanbonmatsu, and Carroll fill so many blanks in the study of the ways that women legislate and how they perceive that work. This book is a must read for scholars of women and politics, American politics, and representation.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dan Ponder’s new book, Presidential Leverage: Presidents, Approval, and the American State (Stanford University Press, 2018), is an important and thoughtful exploration of the concept of presidential leverage, specifically how much capacity the president has to accomplish goals, particularly in terms of asserting power to produce outcomes from Congress. Ponder examines leverage in context, which makes this book very useful in thinking about not only the Executive, but also the Legislature, and the ways in which the branches and political bodies operate in our political system. Presidential Leverage explores not only the president’s role in many of the ways scholars generally assess the president, but also the presidency as part of the state itself. Ponder braids together this understanding of position of the president (and his/her general approval or disapproval by the citizens) and how the strength of that position is tied not just to the office and the person in it, but also to broader conceptualizations of citizen trust in government. Ponder interrogates this dynamic, unpacking and examining the different parts of it, and then integrates these pieces into a quantitative scoring of presidential leverage, giving the reader an understanding of when presidents may have more capacity or political capital and when they may have less influence or ability—but that these capacities, or lack thereof, are not just about the person in the White House, but very much connected to how we, the people, think about our government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2018, much attention has been drawn to candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Randy Bryce: candidates for Congress who’ve made a living doing working class jobs. They are unusual because Congressional candidates are almost always drawn from white collar professions. Why do so few working class candidates run for office? Are workers unfit to govern? Do workers care about politics less? In The Cash Ceiling: Why Only the Rich Run for Office and What We Can Do About It (Princeton University Press, 2018), Nicholas Carnes says “no”, the conventional wisdom is all wrong. Carnes is the Creed C. Black Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Carnes’ book shows the real barriers to more working-class people running for office are that they lack the time and are rarely asked. Synthesizing a variety of new sources of data, Carnes finds that political parties do not look to workers to run, preferring instead professionals drawn from a small array of fields. Carnes does not stop at diagnosing the problem. He offers practical solutions to increase the number of working-class candidates and likely working-class elected officials in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s been a lot written about the Tea Party, but nothing focused on members of Congress like the new book, Reactionary Republicans: How the Tea Party in the House Paved the Way for Trump’s Victory (Oxford University Press, 2018) by Bryan T. Gervais and Irwin L. Morris. Gervais is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Geography at the University of Texas at San Antonio; Morris is professor and chair of the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. In the book, Gervais and Morris disentangle what it meant to be affiliated with the Tea Party in the 112th and 113th congresses. What they suggest is that members of Congress fall into several categories based on self-identification and endorsements by Tea Party interest groups. Using these categories, the authors show the ways that Tea Party members of Congress vote and communicate. They find that Tea Party members resemble other Republican members except when it comes to certain social issues. They also examine social media communications and find that Tea Party members shared messages that were less civil and angrier than other members. These patterns show some of the ways that the Tea Party paved the way for Donald Trump’s campaign and presidential victory in 2016. This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Boston’s political culture is most known within the frame of antebellum political struggles over the institution of slavery. What about Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era Black Bostonian politics though? That story is made clear by the Dr. Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood’s newly published book Race Over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Centering Edwin Garrison Walker, political leader and son of antebellum era abolitionist and pamphleteer David Walker, Bergeson-Lockwood tells the story of how independent Black Bostonian politics was used as a mechanism to shield Black Bostonians from party loyalty. Party loyalty, especially to the Republican Party, could be used to promote a connection to the “Party of Lincoln,” or to retain Black voters despite not always being on the side of their best interest. Ultimately, Black citizenship and the protection of the Black rights were at the forefront of Black Bostonians’ political project, and Bergeson-Lockwood’s history of Black politics in the late nineteenth century dramatically highlights the successes and shortcomings of this era. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this American Political Science Association special podcast, we welcome a special guest host – and former guest of the podcast – Andy Lewis. In addition to his recent book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics, Andy is a contributor to the Religion in Public blog and is associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. Andy and I had the real pleasure to talk with Michele Margolis about her new book From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Margolis is assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. The central argument of From Politics to the Pews is that a solid partisan identity forms before a solid religious identity, thus partisanship can inform religious behavior in ways that we may not have fully understood in the past. Margolis argues that many Americans step away from religion in early adulthood, returning later at the point of decisions about marriage and children. This break in religious activity and practice – though not necessarily in faith or belief– happens as partisan identity and behaviors have already set in. She relies on a wide variety of data to show how this happens and the implications for the relationship between partisanship, religion, and political behavior. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brian Abrams interviewed more than 100 people – Democrats, Republicans, cabinet officials, White House aides, campaign operatives, congresspeople and activists – to piece together a comprehensive oral history of the Barack Obama presidency, in Obama: An Oral History, 2009-2017 (Little A, 2018).  Based almost solely on the words of those who... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary E. Stuckey’s new book, Political Vocabularies: FDR, The Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument (Michigan State University Press, 2018), is a fascinating and engaging investigation of an early period during the Roosevelt Administration that provides the reader with a broad and expansive understanding of different aspects of presidential politics, political rhetoric, communication between elected officials and constituents, and the shifting perceptions of the role of the executive in the American political system. This snapshot in time, in this case, 1935, provides a much bigger picture of power, political change, and the sense of the country as a whole. Stuckey integrates aspects of these letters into her analysis as she explores rhetorical authority and differing political vocabularies as seen while the power and structural dynamics in the United States shifted during this period. She also examines how these letters between clergy members and the president provide readers with an understanding of American politics, religious warrants, and political imaginaries. This is an important and complex analysis because it also gets at the heart of what Americans understand about themselves and the political world in which they engage and participate. This book will be of interest to a broad range of scholars from political scientists and communication scholars to those in theology and religious studies as well as non-academics who will find Stuckey’s research and analysis fascinating in considering how the United States thinks about itself. This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the paradoxes of US politics today is the widely dispersed benefits, but overall distrust, of government. Citizens enjoy many types of social policy, yet reject the process that provides for much aid to individual health, income, and education. What explains this paradox? In The Government-Citizen Disconnect (Russell Sage Foundation Press 2018), Suzanne Mettler finds several answers. Metter is the Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University. Relying on original survey data, Mettler finds that nearly all Americans participate in some form of social policy, though many are largely unaware of it. This unawareness reflects the design of policies within the “submerged state” which hides several public benefits provided through intricacies of the tax code. In part a result, many Americans reject government programs in general as not directly beneficial to them, and support an anti-social policy agenda in Congress. In a period of increasing polarization, this long-standing pattern of American public opinion has been exacerbated and has the potential to undermine social equality and democracy. This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Urban politics scholars have long studied what makes cities interesting. Rarely, however, have these unique qualities of cities been studied in the national context. How do representatives of cities advocate for urban interests in Washington? Do they work together for cities, as a whole, or individually, for district needs within each city? Thomas Ogorzalek’s new book, The Cities on the Hill: How Urban Institutions Transformed National Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018) takes on these questions. Ogorzalek is assistant professor of political science and urban studies at Northwestern University. Studying the “long” New Deal, Ogorzalek finds that on certain issues, especially the provision of public goods and redistribution, city representatives stick together. Members of Congress who represent districts based in cities vote as one, even controlling for other factors, such as partisanship, and diversity of ideology. Supporting this consensus are institutions working to advocate for cities, including local political parties and newly formed interest groups, such as the US Conference of Mayors. This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts—women and men trained in the new field of social science—fanned out across the country to collect data on these fresh arrivals. The trove of information they amassed shaped how Americans thought about immigrants, themselves, and the nation’s place in the world. Katherine Benton-Cohen argues that the Dillingham Commission’s legacy continues to inform the ways that U.S. policy addresses questions raised by immigration, over a century later. Within a decade of its launch, almost all of the commission’s recommendations—including a literacy test, a quota system based on national origin, the continuation of Asian exclusion, and greater federal oversight of immigration policy—were implemented into law. Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Harvard University Press, 2018) describes the labyrinthine bureaucracy, broad administrative authority, and quantitative record-keeping that followed in the wake of these regulations. Their implementation marks a final turn away from an immigration policy motivated by executive-branch concerns over foreign policy and toward one dictated by domestic labor politics. The Dillingham Commission—which remains the largest immigration study ever conducted in the United States—reflects its particular moment in time when mass immigration, the birth of modern social science, and an aggressive foreign policy fostered a newly robust and optimistic notion of federal power. Its quintessentially Progressive formulation of America’s immigration problem, and its recommendations, endure today in almost every component of immigration policy, control, and enforcement. Katherine Benton-Cohen is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the rise of President Donald Trump as the head of the Republican Party, once a Democrat and liberal on many social issues, what does it mean to be a conservative today? What is the glue that connects Trump to other figures and ideas central to the conservative movement, both historical and contemporary? Jeffrey Dudas has an answer to this question: paternalism. Dudas has written Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism (Stanford University Press, 2018). He is Associate Professor of Political Science and Affiliate Faculty of American Studies at the University of Connecticut. For Dudas, what links corporate interests, small-government libertarians, social and racial traditionalists, and evangelical Christians together is a paternal rights discourse that centers around the importance of fatherhood and the family. Raised Right focuses on three conservative figures: National Review editor William F. Buckley, Jr., President Ronald Reagan, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Through extensive analysis of their writing and speeches, Dudas argues that conservatives have focused on paternal discipline as an organizing principle of their worldview since the post-World War II period. Though Trump is not the focus of the book, it is hard to read Raised Right without thinking about the President’s style, rhetoric, and current policy agenda as illustrative of Dudas’ thesis. This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Several recent guests on New Books in Political Science have talked about the path to political polarization in the US, including Lilliana Mason, Dan and Dave Hopkins, and Sam Rosenfeld. The deep divides between the parties have an obvious geographic dimension, but what is the cause? What has allowed people to sort themselves into cities, suburbs, and rural areas of the country? Clayton Nall has an answer to these questions: highways. Nall has written  The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermine Cities (Cambridge University Press, 2018). In the book, Nall connects the federal programs to expand highway construction through the country to differences in political attitudes. In short, highways have contributed to sorting and polarization, allowing people to live and work much farther away than in the past. Using a variety of interesting sources of data, Nall also shows how this sorting has had different impacts on attitudes about transportation spending, with Republicans and Democrats holding distinct views on how federal money should support the physical connections between communities.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Marginalized Majority: Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America (Melville House, 2018) offers a roadmap to reeling progressives, delivers a searing critique of cynical pragmatism and defends identity politics as a galvanizing force for positive social change. Journalist Onnesha Roychoudhuri shares personal stories of how her identity shaped her... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Northern California’s giant redwoods are among the state’s most recognizable natural wonders. These massive trees were also under threat of clear-cut logging for much of the twentieth century, writes Darren Frederick Speece in Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (University of Washington Press, 2017). The book is an exhaustive study of the California timber industry and the environmentalists who used a wide range of tactics, from sit ins and sabotage to courtroom battles, to protect redwood ecosystems. Speece takes a bottom up approach to this history, telling the story from the perspective of the myriad individuals on both sides of the battle who shaped Pacific Coast environmental politics in the mid to late twentieth century. Defending Giants argues that historians of environmentalism have focused too much on birds-eye, national-level politics and have missed the important front line work performed by rural activists, who often put their lives on the line in protection of forests at risk of disappearing forever. Defending Giants is also available as an audio book from University Press Audio Books. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Will voters this fall be voting for or against Donald Trump, even though he isn’t on the ballot? Will they be voting on national issues, such as immigration or relations with North Korea, even when the election is for city council or mayor? If all politics is ultimately local, then the answer should be no. Instead, most assume that national issues will dominate vote choice up and down the ballot in 2018. For Daniel Hopkins, this is not a new phenomenon: the United States has been nationalizing for a long time, and political behavior has long reflected it. Hopkins is the author of The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized (University of Chicago Press, 2018). He is associate professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. In his new book, Hopkins marshals an incredible amount of data, from reanalysis of existing data to newly collected surveys to original experiments. From this mound of data, he shows how US politics has nationalized and why. The increasingly national news media and party polarization has change the way voters consume political information and what they are consuming. The result is an orientation of parties to national issues and political behavior that reflects this shift. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Several years on from the death of Antonin Scalia, what is his legacy? What did he leave the Supreme Court and jurisprudence? In The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption (Yale University Press, 2018), Rick Hasen takes up the large task of answering parts of this question. Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Scalia was funny and rude and innovative. Scalia was disrupter on the court, as the book’s subtitle suggestions. Much of Hasen’s book wrestles with Scalia’s favored ways of interpreting the law, textualism and originalism. Hasen shows the impact of the turn to these approaches, both in specific court rulings, but also in the wider impact on other jurists. Hasen argues that Scalia’s legacy will be protected by the large numbers of lawyers and newly appointed judges who adopted his approaches, including the newest justice, Neil Gorsuch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division (Oxford University Press, 2016), Michael A. Cohen shows how the 1968 American presidential election proved to be an “inflection point” of history that shattered the long-standing “liberal consensus,” and unleashed a conservative populism that continues to reverberate today. Cohen delivers... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sit-in movement that swept the Southern states in 1960 was one of the iconic moments of the post-World War II civil rights movement. Yet the images of students patiently sitting at “whites-only” lunch counters conveys only one facet of a complex series of events. In The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Christopher W. Schmidt chronicles the movement and its impact on the political and legal struggle for civil rights for African Americans. As Schmidt explains, prior to the sit-ins the main civil rights organizations were fighting segregation primarily through the courts. The incremental pace of change frustrated younger activists, with four students at North Carolina A&T ultimately deciding to fight segregation through direct protest. Yet the lunch counter protests they inspired were viewed with considerable ambivalence by the civil rights leadership, who were doubtful that the counters could be compelled to accept black patrons under existing law. Their uncertainly was reflected on the Supreme Court, where the justices’ division on the legality of segregation in privately-run facilities ultimately left the matter to be resolved by Congress in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stories about the suburbs often focus on conservatism. But, as Lily Geismer shows in her fascinating book, called Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberalism and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton University Press, 2014) suburbs can also be liberal spaces. The high-tech corridor of the Route 128 highway that circles Boston is one such example. The book tracks how new economic conditions—namely the rise of a knowledge-based economy and white-collar work—changed the ideological content and organizing strategies of liberalism. And, as suburbanites replaced urban working-class voters as the most significant constituency for the Democratic Party, suburbanites transformed the Democratic Party itself. Their support for environmental causes, reproductive rights, the high-tech economy, and market-based solutions became central to the Democratic Party in the 1980s and 1990s, embodied most clearly in men like Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton. Geismer’s book will be of interest to political historians, urban and suburban historians, and historians of science and technology. Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Democrats need to stop their “monomania” over Donald Trump and reconnect with their party’s core ideals to reclaim political power, argues Thomas B. Reston in his book Soul of a Democrat: The Seven Core Ideals That Made Our Party and Our Country Great (All Points Books, 2018). He explores those ideals... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The award-winning author Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History at the University of Texas. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (Basic Books, 2017) is a biography of the riveting life of Lucy Parsons. As an activist, writer and speaker, Parsons embodied the most radical expression of the battle for labor rights in American history, yet her life remains a mystery. Born an enslaved woman in 1851 of mixed lineage, the circumstances of her birth and early life are unknown. Exceedingly beautiful and articulate, she met and married Albert Parsons, a confederate army veteran, in Waco, Texas in 1872. Their politics shifted from loyal Republicans to socialism and finally to anarchism advocating for white labor in Chicago. As a dynamic and radical duo engaged in extensive writing, charismatic speaking and alliances across multiple labor organizations, they became symbols of unrelenting agitation against industrial capitalism. Their call for armed resistance and involvement with the Haymarket bombing and trial, led to the execution of Albert leaving Lucy Parsons to carry their mutual legacy alone. Jones has brought to life an enigmatic figure whose compelling presence left a mark on the history of the radical movement for labor rights. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in August, 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven Kull is a Senior Research Associate and director of the Program for Public Consultation at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He is also the Founder and Director of the nonpartisan organization Voice of the People, which is working to create structures and institutions that would enrich the channels of communication between Congress and citizens. Steven is a political psychologist who studies a range of phenomena from public political ignorance and popular attitudes about climate change to congressional decision-making and international attitudes towards religion.  The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices