New Books in Political Science

Soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality have been documented by social scientists – but the public conversation and scholarship on inequality has not examined the role of state law and state courts in establishing policies that significantly affect inequality. Political scientists James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson analyze their original database of nearly 6,000 decisions made by over 900 judges on 50 state supreme courts over a quarter century to demonstrate how state high courts craft policy. The fifty state supreme courts shape American inequality in two ways: through substantive policy decisions that fail to advance equality and by rulings favoring more privileged litigants (typically known as "upperdogs"). The book focuses on court-made public policy on issues including educational equity and adequacy, LGBTQ+ rights, and worker's rights. The conventional wisdom assumes that courts protect underdogs from majorities but Gibson and Nelson demonstrate that judges most often favor dominant political elites and coalitions. As such, courts are unlikely to serve as an independent force against the rise of inequality in the United States.James Gibson is the Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government at Washington University in Saint Louis. His research interests are in Law and Politics, Comparative Politics, and American Politics.Michael Nelson is a Professor of Political Science at Penn State University. He studies judicial politics and U.S. state politics, especially public attitudes toward law and courts, judicial behavior, and the politics of court reform. Michael was a guest on the New Books Network for the The Elevator Effect, a book he co-wrote with Morgan Hazelton and Rachael K. Hinkle in 2023.In the podcast, we mention Dr. Gibson’s brand new article regarding the Dobbs abortion case: “Losing legitimacy: The challenges of the Dobbs ruling to conventional legitimacy theory” from the American Journal of Political Science.Daniela Lavergne served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Dr. Daniel Druckman, author of Negotiation, Identity and Justice: Pathways to Agreement, discusses his book, covering topics such as flexibility in negotiation, values and interests, national identity, and process and outcome justice. He also talks about his transition from academia to policy practice, research on procedural justice in peace processes, and future themes for investigation. The podcast includes key takeaways and recommendations for readers, highlighting the importance of research and adaptation in social science careers.

“Is America an Empire?” is a popular question for pundits and historians, likely because it sets off such a provocative debate. All too often, however, people use empire simply because the United States is a hegemon, ignoring the country’s imperial traits to focus simply on its power. Dr. Daniel Immerwahr’s book How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) corrects this by explicitly focusing on the country’s territories and territories overseas possessions.Dr. Immerwahr begins at the country’s founding as apprehension over aggressive westward settlement gave way to enthusiastic land grabs by pioneers such as Daniel Boone. Propelled by an astonishingly high birth rate and immigration, Euroamericans displaced indigenous peoples. In addition to this more familiar narrative, other factors drove territorial expansion. A desperate need for fertilizers led to the annexation of nearly one hundred “guano islands” in the Pacific and Caribbean, followed by the annexation of even more territory following the Spanish-American War in 1898. These new territories, including Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and others enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the United States: they did not enjoy constitutional protections but nevertheless had a close relationship with what they called the mainland. While the United States backed away from traditional colonialism after 1945, what emerged instead was a “pointillist empire” that depended on bases and new uses of older territory to function.Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Never have policy initiatives been so important than in today’s society. Neoliberal manifestations, climate change, civil rights movements, and governmental reactions to these issues have created a backdrop where greater education in policy analysis and development is vital. Listen to this informative interview with one of the authors, Dr. David Young, a Fellow of the Brian Mulroney Institute of government at St. Francis Xavier University, to find out how policy is implemented and shaped by students, teachers, school board representatives, and government officials at the school, board, provincial and federal levels. While focused on the Canadian example, Policy Matters: Perspectives, Procedures, and Processes (Emerald Publishing, 2023) draws from a variety of examples and has relevance to education systems in other countries.Lavinia Stan is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Ever since World War II, the United Nations and other international actors have created laws, treaties, and institutions to punish perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. These efforts have established universally recognized norms and have resulted in several high-profile convictions in egregious cases. But international criminal justice now seems to be a declining force—its energy sapped by long delays in prosecutions, lagging public attention, and a globally rising authoritarianism that disregards legal niceties.The Justice Laboratory: International Law in Africa (Brookings Institution, 2022) by Dr. Kristin Bree Carlson reviews five examples of international criminal justice as they have been applied across Africa, where brutal civil conflicts in recent decades resulted in varying degrees of global attention and action. Written in an accessible style, this book explores the connections between politics and the doctrine of international criminal law. Highlighting little-known institutional examples and under-discussed political situations, the book contributes to a broader international understanding of African politics and international criminal justice, as well as the lessons the African experiences offer for other regions.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

"An air of finality pervades today’s world." That is the opening sentence of Jonathan White’s book In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea (Profile, 2024). What role, the book asks, has the idea of "the future" played in past politics? What role does it play in contemporary politics? Listen to White in discussion with Owen Bennett-Jones.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In Among the Braves Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battles for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy (Hachette, 2023) Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin tell the story of Hong Kong's demise from Two Systems to One Country through the eyes of some of its key actors in the 2019 Anti-Extradition protests. In their richly evocative narrative, Mahtani and McLaughlin draw on their on-the-ground reporting, and weave this through a historical account to foreground the fight of the frontline protestors, referred to in Cantonese as "The Braves", who felt they had no other choice but to resist Beijing's increasingly authoritarian governance. In this interview, we discussed the way that the changing political landscape of Hong Kong is demonstrative of the fragility of democratic institutions. We spoke about attempts by Beijing to erase historical memory through the imposition of increasingly draconian laws. Mahtani and McLaughlin will provide listeners with insight as to why Hong Kong matters, and why the rest of the world should take notice of the global erosion of democratic freedoms. Shibani Mahtani is an international investigative correspondent for the Washington Post. She was previously the Post's Hong Kong and Southeast Asia bureau chief and a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal based in Singapore, Yangon, and Chicago. Her Hong Kong coverage was honored with prizes including a Human Rights Press Award for an investigation into police misconduct. Timothy McLaughlin is a prize-winning contributing writer for The Atlantic. Previously he worked for Reuters news agency. His work has also appeared in publications including WIRED, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and Prospect. He has won multiple awards for his Hong Kong coverage, including two Best in Business Awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing, and is a two-time finalist for The Livingston Award for International Reporting.Jane Richards is a Lecturer in Law at York Law School, UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Most accounts of post-1950s political history tell the story of of the war on drugs as part of a racial system of social control of urban minority populations, an extension of the federal war on black street crime and the foundation for the "new Jim Crow" of mass incarceration as key characteristics of the U.S. in this period. But as the Nixon White House understood, and as the Carter and Reagan administrations also learned, there were not nearly enough urban heroin addicts in America to sustain a national war on drugs. The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs (Princeton University Press, 2023) argues that the long war on drugs has reflected both the bipartisan mandate for urban crime control and the balancing act required to resolve an impossible public policy: the criminalization of the social practices and consumer choices of tens of millions of white middle-class Americans constantly categorized as "otherwise law-abiding citizens."" That is, the white middle class was just as much a target as minority populations. The criminalization of marijuana - the white middle-class drug problem - moved to the epicenter of the national war on drugs during the Nixon era. White middle-class youth by the millions were both the primary victims of the organized drug trade and excessive drug war enforcement, but policymakers also remained committed to deterring their illegal drug use, controlling their subculture, and coercing them into rehabilitation through criminal law. Only with the emergence of crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-1980s did this use of state power move out of suburbs and reemerge more dramatically in urban and minority areas. This book tells a history of how state institutions, mass media, and grassroots political movements long constructed the wars on drugs, crime, and delinquency through the lens of suburban crisis while repeatedly launching bipartisan/nonpartisan crusades to protect white middle-class victims from perceived and actual threats, both internal and external. The book works on a national, regional, and local level, with deep case studies of major areas like San Francisco, LA, Washington, and New York. This history uses the lens of the suburban drug war to examine the consequences when affluent white suburban families serve as the nation's heroes and victims all at the same time, in politics, policy, and popular culture.Matthew D. Lassiter is professor of history and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan, where he is co-director of the Carceral State Project.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

What does nation-branding mean to you? For many listeners, the term probably conjures up ideas of catchy slogans and international tourism or trade promotion campaigns. Think again. In her new book Branding Authoritarian Nations: Political Legitimation and Strategic National Myths in Military-Ruled Thailand (Routledge, 2023), Petra Alderman examines how a military junta deployed nation-branding in the wake of the May 2014 Thai coup d'état, as means of promoting domestic political legitimacy for a regime that had seized power by force. The junta's methods might have appeared 'soft' - avuncular ranging from prime ministerial broadcasts to catchy rap songs - but the goals were deeply authoritarian, and primary audience for the campaigns were not global investors, but ordinary Thai citizens. Thailand has been by no means unique in deploying the rhetoric of nation-branding in service of suppressing human rights and quashing domestic dissent.Petra Alderman is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics and a Research Fellow with the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR), International Development Department, University of Birmingham, UK. She works in the areas of democracy, authoritarianism, elections, environmental leadership, and promotional politics, has a geographical focus on Southeast Asia, and is fluent in Thai. Petra was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen, and her articles have appeared in Asian Studies Review, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Geopolitics, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, and Politics. She can be contacted at p.alderman@bham.ac.ukDuncan McCargo is Professor of Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and is best known for his work on the politics of Thailand. Duncan can be reached at duncan.mccargo@ntu.edu.sg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

For better or worse, democracy and epistemology are intertwined. For one thing, politics is partly a matter of gathering, assessing, and applying information. And this can be done responsibly or incompetently. At least since Plato, a leading critique of democracy has focused on the ignorance of ordinary citizens. Historically, this kind of critique has supplied the basis for several nondemocratic proposals. Yet it has also worked in the background of a range of views within democratic theory. Among these are views that have relied on markets as mechanisms for sharing and distributing information.But there are hazards to market-based thinking about democracy. In Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023), Lisa Herzog explores three conceptually distinct sites where democracy interfaces with epistemology: markets, expert communities, and public deliberation. The result is an integrated political epistemology for democracy.Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science