Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones are the authors of The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill and Jones is the J. J. “Jake” Pickle Regents Chair in Congressional Studies and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. The Politics of Information picks up where the authors’ last book, The Politics of Attention, leaves off. They explore how information enters into the policy process and how that has evolved over time, focusing on what they call the “paradox of search”. They make extensive use of the publicly available data that they have collected over the last decade called the Policy Agendas Project. They argue that: “Information determines priorities, and priorities determine action” (p. 40). They discover is that the policy process is replete with information – not all high quality – and that different policy problems integrate information in different ways. They also find that the government has “broadened” – addressing an ever growing array of issues – rather than just “thickening” – through growth in the overall size of government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas are the authors of Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press 2015). Heaney is assistant professor organizational studies and political science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Rojas is associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Heaney and Rojas take on the interdisciplinary challenge at the heart of studies of political parties and social movements, two related subjects that political scientists and sociologists have tended to examine separately from one another. What results is a needed effort to synthesize the two social science traditions and advance a common interest in studying how people come together to influence policy outcomes. The particular focus of this work is on how the antiwar movement that grew in the mid-2000s interacted with the Democratic Party. They ponder a paradox of activism that just as activists are most successful – in this case supporting a new Democrat controlled House and Senate in 2006 – the energy and dynamism of the movement often fades away. Heaney and Rojas look to the relationship between antiwar activists and the Democratic Party for answers. They find that in a highly polarized partisan environment, party affiliations come first and social movement affiliations second, thereby slowing the momentum movements generate in their ascendency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Prosterman‘s new book Defining Democracy:Electoral Reform and the Struggle for Power in New York City (Oxford University Press, 2013) investigates a neglected topic in U.S. history: the occasional efforts by reformers over the years to bring proportional representation to America. No democracy in the world today is less representative by the standard of “one person, one vote.” (In 2000, three states with more than a quarter of the population, had just six Senators, for example. The seventeen least populous states, with seven percent of the population, had thirty-four.) This is actually an improvement over the past, when various mal-apportionment schemes essentially disenfranchised huge numbers of voters in virtually every state. Prosterman’s book does not look at the national scene, but takes us instead through New York City’s brief experiment with a quirky form “STV” (single transferable vote), the standard in most democracies. Like so many imported European reforms in the early 1900’s, the American version had a fraught experience. But as Prosterman painstakingly details it also invigorated the electoral system in New York, opening the field to an unusually diverse set of candidates for the time: women, blacks, even Communists. To the horror of even formerly sympathetic reformers, like Al Smith. In the end, an equally strange pack of bedfellows conspired to destroy the practice, which locals had voted for overwhelmingly. Yet, for all its flaws and historical particularities, the experiment stands as a useful reminder that democracy is now just about who votes, but how that vote is counted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scholars interested in the history of the civil rights movement in the North will definitely be interested in Brian Purnell‘s new book, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings:The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (University Press of Kentucky, 2014). Thiscase study of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Brooklyn joins one of the fastest-growing areas of research in the field: the roots and experience of the black freedom struggle above the Mason-Dixon. Challenging many of the nation’s persistent beliefs about the geographic timeline and ideological dynamics of that social movement, this literature has broadened our understanding of the past and given us a far more complicated view of the challenges facing grassroots organizations in the years before, during, and following the “classical period,” stretching from Rosa Parks’s arrest to Martin Luther King’s dream. Purnell looks at one of CORE’s most active, aggressive chapters in the North between 1960 and 1965. An exemplar of social history, the book explores the difficulties facing a small organization trying to upset the racial status quo in a city that prided itself on colorblindness–pioneering much of the legislation adopted by the federal government later–despite the fact that in education, housing, and labor segregation prevailed. Aggravating matters were a number of seismic changes in New York, as elsewhere: the flight of industry and middle class taxpayers to the suburbs and Sunbelt, and the influx of millions of laid-off southern sharecroppers to neighborhoods that, because of “de facto” Jim Crow, became increasingly poor,overcrowded, dilapidated, and ridden with trash, crime, and despair. Purnell gives us the story of a group valiantly attempting to avert and assuage these overwhelming developments. As he notes, their failures speak to the reality many still face today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Americans have a paradoxical relationship with cities, Steven Conn argues in his new book,Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2014). Nearly three-quarters of the population lives near an urban center, the result of a centuries-old, global trend that reflects not just industrialization but the role cities have played as engines of economic, social, cultural, intellectual, and political life. Yet two-thirds of this “metropolitan” demographic–half the nation–chooses to reside in the suburbs, and over the years a remarkably consistent and low number of people have said they would prefer to live in a city. This may just reflect circumstance, the outcome of policies that, historians know, were not smartly, and often undemocratically, imposed. But as Morton White recounted decades ago, the intellectuals of the past have been just as anti-urban as politicians. Despite the outsized importance of the seaboard port-cities to the War for Independence, the founders left a Constitution that divided power geographically, not numerically, ensuring that cities would be forever underrepresented. Jefferson expressed the feeling of many early republicans that we could only maintain our virtue and freedom by remaining a nation of small yeoman, even while doubling the country’s size and guaranteeing its commercial development. Henry David Thoreau, writing in a more democratic age, told readers to go to “the woods” to find individuality–from a cabin one mile outside Concord. This anti-urban tradition was briefly interrupted in the late 1800’s, when, as Conn writes, for the first time the problems of the city became the problems of the nation. Many Progressives advocated European-style planning to meet the challenges for which cities were infrastructurally unprepared and often governmentally powerless to resolve. But as Conn writes, many thinkers also continued to see the city itself as the problem, and saw the solution as decentralization: dispersing population and industry. During the interwar period, the car, and electricity, stepped in to meet their needs, and when the Great Depression hit, FDR and the New Dealers fell back on this generation of thought, coming forward with a battery of programs that would unravel the city–and the famous coalition he built. Indeed, while the anti-urban tradition has often been the vehicle for an illiberal free-market political agenda, Conn shows that it has covered the ideological spectrum. The postwar Right in the Sunbelt helped speed the decline of the industrial belt in the North by advertising its bourgeoning megalopolises as the antithesis of the urban: free of high-rises, zoning, civil rights protestors, unions, and government in general, even while it relied on billions in federal tax dollars, saw high rates in crime, and increasingly had to reverse itself and create basic municipal services. But the anti-urban sentiment cut across the aisle, from the enthusiasm of postwar liberals for “urban renewal” and highways to the hippies’ revival of the back-to-the-land fantasy and the flowering of 1990’s communitarianism. The nation’s anti-urban policies remain, as does the bipartisan impulse, which makes this book’s subject as relevant as ever. Perhaps, as Conn says, in this era of hip gentrification, when the children of the suburbs are returning to cities, the “new urbanists” will break internationally odd pattern. But they will have to grapple with the multidimensional legacy of the nation’s anti-urban past. And Conn’s intellectual and cultural history, the first of its kind, will be the place to start. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As campaign season ends, what can we make of all those ads? Brian Arbour is the author of Candidate-Centered Campaigns: Political Messages, Winning Personalities, and Personal Appeals (Palgrave-MacMillan 2014). Arbour is assistant professor of political science at John Jay College, City University of New York. Why do certain candidates focus on making campaign promises and extolling their legislative record, while others just talk about themselves? Arbour argues that scholars have underplayed the personal narratives that feature so prominently in much campaign advertising. As a result, candidate-centered appeals for votes have been largely ignored or misunderstood. Arbour aims to address this deficit with his new book that examines the way candidates talk about their own background and the background of opponents. He argues that candidate-centered campaigns build trust with voters as one would with neighbors or new co-workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For most Americans, Tammany Hall is a symbol of all that was dishonest, corrupt, illiberal, and venal about urban government and the political machines that ran it in the past, a shorthand for larceny on a grand scale. Not so, says Terry Golway. In his new book Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (Liveright, 2014) Golway argues that Tammany, a popular nickname for the Democratic organization of the County of New York (better known as Manhattan), introduced a “new politics” and a “new social contract” to America. Tammany, he shows, encouraged voters in an undemocratic republican era to look to accessible local figures for protection from the devastations of laissez-faire capitalism in a time before the safety net. Arguing that the Irish who escaped the potato famine brought with them lessons about the importance of power and the usefulness of “transactional” relationships between voters and elected officials, Golway believes that Tammany came to represent the modern way of practicing democracy: interest-based politics. While many of its flaws cannot not be denied, he writes, the popular narrative has also been shaped by the reformers of the past, who tended to mix their critiques with class-based fear and moralism, if not outright anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-urban sentiment. William “Boss” Tweed personifies the organization for most, although his reign lasted just two years. A better representative, Golway thinks, is Charles Murphy, the longest-running leader of the party chapter, and the man who nurtured the careers of two young legendary, nation-changing reformers, and proud Tammany men: Robert Wagner and Al Smith, forerunners and major architects of the New Deal. Sure to stir a little debate, Golway’s book is revisionism in a good spirit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century. Author Matthew Huber shows the crucial role oil and housing policy played in the New Deal and how, in subsequent decades, government policies drove many Americans to the suburbs and increased their dependence on petroleum. Although such policies were central to suburbanization, Americans in these new neighborhoods tended to forget this fact, and instead, saw their success in the suburbs as the outcome of private achievements. Over time, such places became the crucible for the growth of neoliberalism. Lifeblood demonstrates the role oil played not only in suburbanization, but in the rightward shift of American politics over the past four decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 fiction and that the government can actually closely circumscribe religious practice? Clearly not. The government can’t ban a putatively religious practice just because it’s expedient to do so. So where’s the line? In God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, Second Edition, 2014), Marci A. Hamilton argues that it’s shifting rapidly. Traditionally, the government, congress, and courts agreed that though Americans should enjoy extensive religious freedom, that freedom did not include license to do anything the religious might like. A sensible accommodation between church and state had to be made so that both the church and state could do their important work. According to Hamilton, in recent decades radical religious reformers have mounted a successful campaign to throw the idea of a sensible accommodation out the window. They have expanded the scope of religious liberty and thereby limited the ability of the government to protect citizens generally. In this sense, she says, religion–a force for great social good, in her mind–has been made into an instrument of harm for many Americans. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dede Feldman is the author of Inside the New Mexico Senate: Boots, Suits, and Citizens (University of New Mexico Press, 2014). Feldman retired from the New Mexico Senate in 2012 and is a former journalist and now is a political commentator in Albuquerque. Feldman provides a first-hand account of the state legislative process. Her colorful stories of many legends of New Mexico politics reveal the complexity of a part-time legislature. She ends the book with an array of ideas to reform the institution and limit some of the forces she sees as destructive and harmful. The book would make an excellent addition to an undergraduate course in State and Local Government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Oxford University Press series on digital politics has produced several new books that we have featured on the podcast. Interviews with Dave Karpf, Dan Kreiss, and Muzammil Hussain are available in previous podcasts. One of the latest from the series is Jennifer Stromer-Galley new book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (OUP 2014). Stromer-Galley is associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. This excellent new book is a bit of a walk down memory lane. Do you remember the early search features on Yahoo! and those slow loading webpages of the late 1990s? Stromer-Galley pieces together the use of the internet from 1996 through 2012. We learn about some of the ways the promise of the internet to democratize the presidential campaign process has largely failed. Presidential websites have nearly always sent information out, but rarely invited information back in. And even when they have, that information has never been as central to the campaign as often promised. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It seems that everyone in Hollywood is on the political Left. “Seems” is the operative word here, because there are actually Republicans in pictures, at least according to this website. (NB: I have no idea whether the folks who created this list know what they’re talking about, so beware.) Nonetheless, it’s pretty certain that most–the vast majority?– of Hollywood-types are on the Left. But it wasn’t always so, as Donald T. Critchlow shows in his fascinating book When Hollywood Was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio Moguls, and Big Business Remade American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2013). There was a time–the 1940s and 1950s–when Conservatives were an important and very vocal faction in Hollywood. This group emerged out of opposition to the New Deal and found their issue in anti-Communism. They were, truth be told, never terribly numerous. But they made up for their small numbers by their political savvy and, ultimately, their ability to produce skillful, viable political candidates. One of them, of course, was Ronald Reagan, who proved to be very skillful and very viable indeed. It’s a remarkable and largely forgotten story. Listen in. This interview is brought to you by Cambridge University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicholas Carnes is the author of White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Carnes is an assistant professor of public policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. There is surprisingly little in the research literature on the link between social class and legislative behavior. For a topic that seems so ripe for investigation, Carnes’ data collection and analysis open new ground and answer pressing questions. He shows that formerly blue collar workers who serve in Congress behave differently than formerly white collar workers. Blue collar workers are in the extreme minority in numbers, meaning their efforts to pass legislation that tilts towards the working class are often stymied. Carnes offers fresh insight into why this matters for representation more generally and several recommendations for how to rectify this in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Anzia is the author of Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Anzia is assistant professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC-Berkeley. Why are some elections held in November and others in May, June, or July? Why are some elections timed to correspond with the congressional schedule, but others on odd years? When elections occur has long been known to strongly relate to voter turnout, but little research has pushed beyond this simple conclusion. Anzia’s book explores the motivations behind moving local elections from “on-cycle” – held to correspond with presidential or congressional elections in November — to “off-cycle”. She explores the history of the issue and the ways Progressive Era reformers saw advantages in holding municipal elections separate from national and state elections. She tracks that history up to today with excellent data on the relationship between when an election is held and certain policy outcomes. She finds that interest groups stand to benefit from off-cycle election. Teacher pay is substantially higher in school districts that hold elections off-cycle, rather than on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Lewis is the author of Direct Democracy and Minority Rights: A Critical Assessment of the Tyranny of the Majority in the American States (Routledge, 2013). Lewis is an assistant professor of Political Science at Siena College. The book is primarily about the intersection of various forms direct democracy (ballot initiatives, referendum, etc.) and minority rights. Much of the existing literature has been “agnostic” on the persistent concern among political scientists about the tyranny of the majority. Lewis makes a different argument that there is both a direct and an indirect effect of direct democracy. Using Event History Analysis of several policies to restrict minority rights (prohibitions on same-sex marriage, bans on affirmative action), he finds substantial evidence that states in which voters have strong powers of direct democracy have routinely passed limits on minority rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kristin A. Goss is author of The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice (University of Michigan Press 2013). She is associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. Goss challenges the conventional wisdom about women’s group with new congressional hearing data. Rather than ebbing-and-flowing like waves, Goss suggests that the women’s groups have not always diminished in influence following a major policy success. The Paradox of Gender Equality should have a wide audience among interest group, gender studies, and social movement scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you went to college in the United States and took a Western Civ class, you’ve probably read at least a bit of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791). The two are so often paired in history and political science classes that they are sometimes published together. No wonder, really, because Paine’s Rights of Man was written in response to Burke’s Reflections. It’s easy to understand why these two book are standard fare in college: arguably, Burke’s and Paine’s books are the intellectual well-springs of what we call the republican (with a small “r”) “Right” and the “Left.” Much of what American Republicans think can be traced to Burke; much of what American Democrats think can be traced to Paine. For this reason, Burke and Paine are–with the possible exception of J.S. Mill–the most important political thinkers in the modern Western republican tradition. And for all these reasons, Yuval Levin‘s wonderful The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2013) is very relevant today. Levin masterfully explains not only why Burke and Paine thought what they thought (that is, he provides the historical context for their ideas), but he also makes clear how their ideas matter today. Listen in and find out why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Medvic is the author of In Defense of Politicians: The Expectations Trap and Its Threat to Democracy (Routledge 2013). He is associate professor of government at Franklin and Marshall University. Medvic confronts the widespread dissatisfaction with Washington, Congress, and politicians from a new perspective. He argues that much of the antipathy towards politicians is based on faulty expectations, what he calls an “expectations trap”. The public wants often contradictory things from politicians: strongly held beliefs and the willingness to make deals; ambition and wisdom, but not so much of each that they are self-serving. Medvic calls for more realistic expectations of what function politicians play in a democracy to move beyond some of the current public frustrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William G. Howell, Saul P. Jackman, and Jon C. Rogowski are the authors of The Wartime President: Executive Influence and the Nationalizing Politics of Threat (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Howell is professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Jackman is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Rogowski is assistant professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis. The book is a meaty and complex analysis of the presidency during war. They rely on formal modeling to develop a theory of Policy Priority. In other work, that has bogged down the prose, but here the writing is clear and the case studies presented toward the end of the book enrich their analysis. What we learn is that presidents benefit from war in their domestic agenda. As members of congress shift to focusing on national concerns, rather than local, they more closely adhere to the preferences of the president. This pattern isn’t without exceptions, and Howell et al. show the interesting cases (LBJ with Vietnam and GW Bush in 2005 with social security reform) where the model doesn’t predict outcomes as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Glenn Feldman is the author of The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865-1944 (Alabama UP 2013). He is professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the author of eight other books. Feldman’s book is a deeply provocative analysis of southern politics and political history. He explains the recurring themes in southern politics as an outgrowth of “Reconstruction Syndrome”. Themes of anti-government, anti-taxation, and deep suspicion of outsiders (African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants), run throughout the history of southern politics, and remain today. Feldman focuses much of his book on showing that the Democratic Party lost the south long before the passage of the civil rights laws in the 1960s. He tracks the shift in political allegiances back to the 1930s and even earlier. The book challenges conventional notions and is likely to stimulate debate and controversy. It is a worthwhile read for historians of the time period and political scientists, alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stella M. Rouse is the author of Latinos in the Legislative Process: Interests and Influence (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Rouse is assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland and a research fellow at the Center for American Politics and Citizenship. Commentators lauded Latino voters in 2012, but it is Latino elected-officials that increasingly hold power at the national and state-levels. In 2009, 242 Latino served in state legislatures and 27 Latinos were in the House of Representatives. While these numbers are not proportionate to the size of the Latino population, they are record highs. Rouse links together this descriptive representation to the ways those Latino officials make policy and vote on issues important to Latinos, what she labels substantive representation. She finds that education, healthcare, and jobs were the top priorities for Latino legislators – immigration was named by only 8% of respondents. She concludes that “Immigration is important, but it is not at the forefront of priorities for either the Latino public or for Latino elites.” Rouse extends this analysis to the agenda setting and voting behavior of Latinos. She finds that Latino legislators are more likely to introduce Latino-interest legislation when the percentage of Latinos in the party is smaller. At the roll call stage of the legislative process, though, Latino legislators behave no differently than others. Overall, Rouse’s new book has a lot to offer scholars of Congress, agenda setting, and ethnic studies. Her analysis is timely and advances what we know about Latinos and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vanessa Williamson is coauthor (with Theda Skocpol) of The Tea Party: Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 2012), a New Yorker magazine “Ten Best Political Books of 2012”). Williamson is a Ph.D. student at Harvard University and Skocpol is professor of government and sociology at Harvard University. A lot has been written about the Tea Party, much from journalists and commentators. Williamson and Skocpol add a welcome scholarly vantage point, but don’t rest on the distance many academic prefer. They travel the country, interviewing Tea Party advocates, attending Tea Party gatherings in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Arizona. They also mine traditional social science sources of information as well. What results is a nuanced portrait of a very complex modern political phenomenon. The Tea Party, according to Williamson and Skocpol, is in part the result of grassroots activism, part top-down policy entrepreneurship, and part modern media promotion. This book unearths many of the institutional dimensions of the Tea Party movement that help explain how it grew so quickly – 1,000 Tea Party groups formed in just the initial period – and grew so powerful – millions of dollars coalesced to help fund, train, and mobilize supporters and candidates. The electoral successes in the 2010 elections and subsequent policy victories in state tax, budget, and voting policy are the most obvious legacy to date. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William G. Howell (with David Brent) is the author of the new book Thinking about the Presidency: The Primacy of Power (Princeton UP, 2013). Howell is the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at the University of Chicago, where he holds a joint appointment in the Harris School of Public Policy. Howell’s thesis is simple: “Power is every president’s North Star.” He argues in this succinct book that by focusing attention on the expansion of power, we can best understand the presidency and its evolution. Combining historical analysis of key documents and a synthesis of current scholarship, Howell offers a convincing and provocative case for power as the central feature of the presidency. Given the current attention to the Obama presidency’s treatment of secrets, privacy, and security, Howell’s book has much to add to these contemporary debates. The book builds a deep, scholarly argument, but one that could be read and appreciated by undergraduates and the public-at-large. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Barbara Palmer and Dennis Simon are authors of Women and Congressional Elections: A Century of Change (Lynne Rienner, 2012). Palmer is associate professor of political science at Baldwin Wallace University and Dixon is professor of political science at Southern Methodist University. They have combined to write a deeply informative book about the trajectory of women in congress. The book offers many great anecdotes from the trail blazers: Elizabeth Cady Stanton (the first woman to run for congress), Margaret Chase Smith (the first woman elected to the Senate), and Shirley Chisom (the first African American woman elected to Congress). The authors also put together a new dataset of the universe of women candidates for office. What they find about where women succeed and the challenges they face after winning reveals a lot about what it means for a woman to run for office. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew J. Taylor is the author of Congress: A Performance Appraisal (Westview Press, 2013). Taylor is professor of political science in the School of Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State University. His newest book examines the much maligned branch of government and offers some help. He takes the novel approach of establishing a series of benchmarks, as the federal government might about an intransigent agency, and then assesses the extent to which Congress meets those benchmarks. There are 37 benchmarks in total, some that Congress scores highly on – such as many elements of transparency and accessibility – while others – for example, effective policy making – Congress scores poorly. Taylor ends the book with offering recommendations about how to improve Congress through some familiar, but other novel changes. The book would make a great addition to an undergraduate survey of Congress or US political institutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drew Maciag, author of Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism (Cornell University Press, 2013) spoke with Ray Haberski about the intellectual challenges Burke raised in a time of democratic revolutions and the legacy he left for thinkers who attempted to leverage tradition in the face of political change. Maciag’s book is well-written and smartly conceived. His subject spans the entire history of the United States, from the Revolution to the present day, and introduces readers to American thinkers who continue deserve our attention. He also does an expert job addressing the conflict between liberalism and conservatism by demonstrating the roles historical contingency and personality play in shaping these complicated terms. Maciag’s book serves a diverse community of readers, from academics looking for smart arguments about political theory to general readers who are interested in origins and development of the poles of American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich are authors of the provocative new book, The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies (Rowman and Littlefield 2013). Dr. Tienken is an assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Services at Seton Hall University, and is also currently the editor of the American Association of School Administrators Journal of Scholarship and Practice and the Kappa Delta Pi Record. Dr. Orlich is professor emeritus of education and science instruction at Washington State University, Pullman. Their new book is an unabashed critique of nearly five decades of school reform and the questionable assertions and arguments made by many advocates for standardization, nationalization, and corporatization of public schools. They refer to the famed “Sputnik” moment of the 1950s as a manufactured crisis that Bon Jovi might call a “vagabond king wearing a Styrofoam crown”. They call A Nation at Risk, the landmark study of educational performance in US schools, “an intellectually vapid and data challenged piece of propaganda” and the current federal law, No Child Left Behind, “Stalinist-inspired”. Deep down, this book is a critique of the neoliberal theory of government applied to education. Tienken and Orlich argue that standardization, testing, and charter schools have been foisted upon local school in deference to neoliberalism, rather than in service of students. They suggest that better policies can better improve education. A few highlights from the podcast interview. On Sputnik and Bon Jovi: “Bon Jovi and Sambora have a song off the album, These Days, and the song is called These Days, and in that song they use phrase “vagabond king wearing a Styrofoam crown”. And I heard that phrase and it struck me: yes, that really sums up Sputnik in one phrase, Sputnik is the really the genesis of the school bashing and the current school reform movement. Everyone refers to it as if it was a meaningful event in terms of school reform.” On A Nation at Risk: “When you read A Nation at Risk, we challenge anyone to go ahead and find the actual data to support the claims and conclusions they draw.” On federal education policy: “Under Obama and the Republicans in terms of the Common Core State Standards and new national testing initiatives, so really for the first time in this country’s history, curriculum is being determined by a small group of elites far away from your kids’ and my kids’ schools. That is problematic culturally but also educationally.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel McCool, professor of political science at the University of Utah, is the editor of The Most Fundamental Right: Contrasting Perspectives on the Voting Rights Act (Indiana University Press, 2012). The VRA was one of the center pieces of the civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s. The Act aimed to address great inequities in access to and participation in voting, particularly among African Americans. Perhaps most controversially, the law labeled a handful of states that were deemed the most egregious violators of voting rights, and required them to gain pre-clearance from the Department of Justice on any changes in state voting procedures. Nearly fifty years later, is the case for the VRA still so pressing or are modifications or a complete overhaul called for? This timely collection provides deep theoretical and empirical justifications for the VRA, and equally well-developed arguments in opposition. One finished the collection more informed and a little unsure of what is called, both signs of a well-edited volume. The timeliness of this book cannot be overstated. On Wednesday February 26, 2013, the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Voting Rights case of Shelby County v Holder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mitt Romney must feel like Charlie Brown. Always facing an uphill climb against a popular incumbent, Romney truly believed he would kick the veritable football and take the White House. Unfortunately for the GOP, Lucy (Obama) jerked the football away leaving Romney to fall flat and conservatives to wander the political wilderness. Take heart Mitt Romney–Scott Farris has written the book for you. Scott Farris‘ Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation (Lyons Press, 2011) details how “losers” changed American politics. A journalist who has dabbled in the dark arts of politics, Farris has spent decades writing about state and national politicians. Understanding this rare species enabled him to pen a sprawling work that depicts nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century losers. This is a fine book and fun read. Listen to the interview, buy the book and tell a friend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scott Melzer is the author of Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War (New York University Press, 2012). Scott earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside and now is an associate professor of Sociology at Albion College. His book adds to the growing list of scholarship on gun control and gun rights. Scott’s disciplinary background in Sociology contributes to a better understanding of the nature of the NRA’s members, the links between their views towards guns and other issues, and what lies ahead for the organization. Through in-depth interviews with NRA members, we learn more about what it means to be a part of this organization, something few scholars have addressed directly in the past. The book is both a great read about policy, about an influential interest group, but also about the sociology of an organization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thomas Holyoke has recently published Competitive Interests: Competition and Compromise in American Interest Group Politics with Georgetown University Press (2011). Tom is an Associate Professor of Political Science at California State University – Fresno. His book advances political science knowledge of the political process through an in-depth analysis of the role of interest groups. The book is based on interviews with nearly 90 lobbyists who have advocated on issues as varied as environmental policy to banking reform. The book contributes a rich empirical analysis supported by statistical models, but also a careful development of theory. Holyoke speaks to both the interest group audience and the wider field of American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lisa Garcia Bedolla and Melissa Michelson are the co-authors of Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming the Electorate through Get-Out-The-Vote Campaigns (Yale University Press 2012). Lisa is associate professor of social and cultural studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and Melissa Michelson is professor of political science at Menlo College. Their book takes up the challenge to better understand how effective voter mobilization efforts actually are. Using field experiments across California conducted in partnership with community organizations, they demonstrate what works and what doesn’t work to get ethnoracial voters out to the polls. The book can be read by scholars and practitioners alike who are interested in the civic engagement, political behavior, and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Kreiss is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012) traces the integration of new media into the presidential campaigns of Howard Dean and then Barack Obama. Kreiss argues that by focusing on innovation, infrastructure, and organization, scholars can better understand how new media has become central to understanding political campaigns in the US. The book draws on dozens of interviews with most of the largely unknown, but integral members of the campaigns of Dean and Obama. The story Kreiss tells reveals much about the nature of modern political campaigns and how the Internet has shaped the last decade of American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mitchel A. Sollenberger, assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Mark J. Rozell, professor of public policy at George Mason University, have co-authored the provocative The President’s Czars: Undermining Congress and the Constitution (University of Kansas Press, 2012). The book uses a public law methodology to study the evolving role so-called “czars” play in the presidency. Presidential czars, as they define them, are given policy making authority by the president, but are not confirmed by the Senate. Thus, they operate with little accountability to the legislative branch. Their existence, which increased in numbers and importance over the twentieth century, raises serious questions about their appropriateness and constitutionality. The book concludes with a set of recommendations to address these concerns and rebalance the relationship between the president and Congress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Enid Logan‘s At this Defining Moment: Barack Obama: Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race (NYU Press, 2011) examines the campaign and politics around the election of Barack Obama from a sociological perspective. Drawing on a rich array of television, newspaper, and blogs, Logan challenges many of the conventional interpretations of the Obama victory. In trying to define the “new politics of race”, the book is a contribution to the field of political science, where scholars have also grappled with putting the first African American president into political, historical, and social context. One of the more compelling chapters of the book deals with the intersection of Hispanic and Asian Americans and the Obama campaign. The length, clear-writing, and salient topic should make this a considered adoption for many courses in American politics, race and politics, and campaigns/elections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic (Broadside Books, 2012), Jay Cost, a political analyst and columnist for The Weekly Standard, traces the history of the Democratic party from its 1828 conception through to the modern day. Costa believes the party has strayed from its once noble goal of standing up for the “little guy” and become a political force ruled by the combined influences of a variety of special interest groups. In our interview, we talked about why he sees Woodrow Wilson, not FDR, as the founder of the modern Democratic party, the relationship between the Democrats and the press, and how American labor unions have changed over time. Read all about it, and more, in Cost’s tough new book. Please become a fan of New Books in Public Policy on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind (St. Martin’s Press, 2011), Tim Groseclose, Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at UCLA, discusses his quantitative measurements of political bias in the American news media. Based on years of in-depth studies, he concludes that nearly every mainstream media outlet is skewed to the left of the American electorate, and that this bias has helped push the American electorate to the left of where it would be otherwise. In our interview, we talked about different kinds of media bias, as well as bias in academia, and the effect it has had on Professor Groseclose’s career. Read all about it, and more, in Groseclose’s illuminating new book Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him (BenBella Books, 2011), Phil Kerpen, vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity and columnist at FoxNews.com, argues that President Obama’s is trying to bypass Congress with an activist regulatory agenda. In our interview, we talked about the regulatory process, the Obama health care law, and what net neutrality means for the future of the Internet. Read all about it, and more, in Kerpen’s alarming new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its goal, since actual racial mixing in U.S. schools has declined steadily over the last 35 years. But in her new book, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark (Oxford UP, 2011), Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow argues that the legacy of Brown should be viewed in a larger context. Neither a self-executing mandate for racial equality nor a futile rhetorical exercise, the decision was destined to become a lodestar for a wide variety of reformers in all areas of American society — and beyond. In a series of case studies, Dean Minow’s book reveals how Brown, the milestone in American jurisprudence, took on meanings the judges never envisioned, in the hands of advocates who, in 1954, nobody could have expected. Whatever else it was, the decision was that vital ingredient to be coupled with any kind of action: an idea whose time had come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marriage is at the center of some of our fiercest political debates. Here are some recent developments regarding marriage in the United States. Earlier this year, the Justice Department announced that it would no longer defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). A few weeks ago, New York became the largest state to allow same-sex marriage, joining five other states, the District of Columbia, and the Coquille and Suquamish Indian tribes in Oregon. The Senate Judiciary Committee has recently started to consider a bill that would grant federal benefits to same-sex married couples. But to what extent should the state be involved at all in regulating or recognizing marriage? In her recent book, Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State, and the Case for Their Divorce (Princeton University Press, 2010), Tamara Metz argues for the “disestablishment” of marriage. Marriage, Metz argues, like religion, should be separated from the state. She further claims that the liberal state should only be in the business of legally recognizing a wide variety of intimate caregiving unions among consenting, able-minded, able-bodied, adult intimates. In this interview, she clarifies her position further. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Columbia University Press, 2008), Houston A. Baker makes the argument that many contemporary black public intellectuals, otherwise known as African American “academostars,” are self-serving individuals who distort the message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and belie the overall aims of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. He calls out five main figures: Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and even Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson. Betrayal has been described both as a “brave and funny vernacular broadside” and “an important and absorbing meditation” on contemporary discussions of American politics. This book is immensely important not only for the way it clarifies the often misconstrued and misapplied rhetoric of Dr. King, but also the way in which it takes pains to historicize the plight of African Americans. I am personally persuaded by this book, and I highly recommend it. While Betrayal was published in the same year as the election of America’s first president of African descent, it offers us a framework for understanding our “now”: the upcoming 2012 election season, much of the Tea Party rhetoric, and even the political challenges that Barack Obama faces in relation to contemporary racial conflict. Baker is a distinguished university professor of English at Vanderbilt University, and he is a well-known literary and cultural critic, focusing on African American arts and politics. He is also a creative writer, with a recently published volume of poetry entitled Passing Over. I hope to have him on the show again to discuss that book. Till then, I’m certain you’ll be thoroughly engaged in this lively interchange. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent months, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk about filibustering in the Senate, about how Senate Democrats acquired a filibuster-proof majority in the 2008 elections only to lose it by the midterm elections of 2010 when Scott Brown was elected to replace Ted Kennedy. Filibustering has become the norm in the Senate, so much so that it is taken for granted that the Senate minority party will threaten filibustering more often than not. This has led Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to issue calls for reforming the filibuster process in order to make it more difficult for any minority party in the Senate to be obstructionist. In a timely new book, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Gregory Koger explains the American filibuster, catalogs its use in the House and Senate, measures its impact, and finally theorizes why and how obstruction has been institutionalized in the Senate, particularly in the last 50 years. In this interview he explains, among other things, the long pedigree of obstruction in the Senate, how and why filibustering became routinized, and why reform will not be easy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think that many smart people, particularly on the Left, make a really ill-considered assumption, to wit, that “Republican” means “Conservative.” I don’t mean lower case “c” conservative, as in wanting to maintain the status quo. Nearly all (there are important exceptions) twentieth-century Republicans were conservatives in that generic sense. Rather, I mean capital “c” conservative, that is, pro-religion, traditional family centered, militarily hawkish, arch-patriotic, Constitution protecting, States rights shielding, free enterprise loving, individual responsibility promoting, values matter Conservative. It was only in the 1980s that a goodly number of Republicans endorsed this set of beliefs. They were believers, it’s just that they believed things that most members of the East Coast commentariat (at least before the rise of Limbaugh, et al.) did not. From the results of the recent mid-term elections in the United States, I think it’s fair to say they still don’t. In his wonderfully written, witty, and engaging book The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism (Princeton UP, 2010), David Farber tells the story of how Conservatives took over the Republican Party and reshaped American politics. He does so using a devise that I find particularly appropriate for any story of political change, namely, through the lives of the people who founded, grew, and led the movement. Farber, who clearly believes that leadership matters a great deal in democratic politics (I couldn’t agree more), has a talent for linking biography to political history. Farber’s sketches of Robert Taft, William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schlafly, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush show us the degree to which their personalities shaped the rise (and fall) of American Conservatism. Each vignette is a pleasure to read and full of enlightening and entertaining observations. And though Farber pulls no punches (he does not shrink, for example, from calling a liar a liar), it’s clear that he respects his subjects and suggests that we should respect them too. In his estimation (and mine as well), they were not the collection of benighted, fearful, blinkered, country-bumpkin bigots that you can read about in The Nation. They were believers, it’s just that they believed things that most members of the East Coast commentariat (at least before the rise of Limbaugh, et al.) did not. From the results of the recent mid-term elections in the United States, I think it’s fair to say they still don’t. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I always assumed that the Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York and created the massive Jewish American labor movement brought their leftist politics with them from the Old Country. But now I know different thanks to Tony Michels’ terrific Fire in their Hearts. Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard University Press, 2005). As Tony explains, most of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants who arrived in New York were apolitical, or rather feared politics having come from a regime that punished open political activity (Tsarist Russia). These immigrants, then, learned socialism on American shores. Their teachers were Jewish members of the Russian intelligentsia who themselves had fled Tsarist oppression in the 1880s. These Russian Jews were radicals, but not necessarily socialists. So, interestingly, they learned socialism–or at least a new brand of socialism–on American shores as well. But who taught the Russian Jews socialism? Tony has the answer: German socialists who had immigrated to the Lower East Side (a.k.a Kleindeutschland) in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. So the chain of transmission begins in Germany with the rise of the German Socialist Democratic Party (1860s), moves to New York with the immigration of German socialists to the Lower East Side (1870s), picks up after the arrival and conversion of the Russian Jewish radicals to German-style populist socialism (1880s), and ends with the flowing of the Yiddish labor movement in New York (1890s-1900s). What a story! Along the way Tony introduces us to a huge cast of colorful characters, explains the origin of the modern Yiddish literary language, gives us a peek at the lively Yiddish periodical press, and shows us Jewish socialists fighting for the rights of workers along side their gentile brothers and sisters. Misconceptions are destroyed, myths exploded, and stereotypes dashed. Read all about it! Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In just a few days, the United States will inaugurate its first black president, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. And though it’s a momentous day for the cause of equality, Mr. Obama is hardly the first African American to come to DC to serve the people of the United States. His way was paved by well over one hundred black legislators who served over the past 140 years in the House and Senate. Happily, you can read all about them in wonderful Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007 (U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Clerk, Office of History and Preservation, 2008). This is book has three cardinal virtues. First, it’s timely, as we’ve said. The editors and authors deserve praise for seeing it into print at exactly the right moment. Second, it’s well researched and written. The entries–one for each black legislator–are at once informative, rich in detail, and full of humor and pathos. Finally, it’s a beautifully designed and produced work. This book is, like its companion Women in Congress 1917-2006, a work of great craftsmanship, and should be acknowledged as such. Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007 is the sort of book you buy to keep and hand down to your children. So buy it, hand it down, and preserve the memory of those who came before President Obama. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did you ever wonder how we got from a moment in which almost everything on film could be censored (the Progressive Era) to the moment in which nothing on film could be censored (today)? From the Nickelodeon to Deep Throat? The answer is provided by Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond J. Haberski in their wonderful new book The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court (University of Kansas Press, 2008). You’ve probably never heard of “The Miracle” or the case it launched in 1949. It’s a short film by Roberto Rossellini about a deranged women who, having slept with a man she believes is St. Joseph, gives birth to a child in a deserted mountain church. Fellini has a bit part (as “Joseph”). Critics generally liked it; Catholics in New York generally didn’t. The Church mounted a campaign against the film and the authorities relented: “The Miracle” was banned on the grounds that it was “sacrilegious.” In 1949, those were fine grounds. Not for long. The film’s distributor–the feisty Joseph Burstyn–fought for the right to exhibit it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1952. And he won. Between 1952 and 1965, the states got out of the film-censorship business and we entered a new era of free-speech absolutism when it comes to film. One wonders if that’s a good thing. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices