Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2024 -

This volume is the most comprehensive and scholarly account of the administration of President Bill Clinton focused on domestic policy that one could hope to read. Lichtenstein (Univ. of California) and the late Judith Stein (CUNY) are highly critical of the neoliberal, pro-business slant of Clinton's advisers. Despite trumpeting progressive policies in 1993, Clinton went on to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which regulated banks, and, also in 1996, in collusion with Republicans, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. Both were products of the New Deal, backed by many Democrats. The roots of this ideological heresy, according to the authors, lay in the tendency of Clinton's advisers to want to "manage" situations. During the struggle over health care, Clinton's advisers overly trusted their business allies only to see them withdraw support as resistance grew. Clinton's embrace of NAFTA also helped decimate the US manufacturing industry. The result was a political and economic program dominated by Wall Street financial interests. This was a far cry from the "economy, stupid" campaign of 1992. Democratic constituencies, such as labor and the poor, took a back seat to conservative interests, leading to protests at the 1999 World Trade Conference in Seattle. An excellent work.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

McMahon (Trinity College) offers a compelling argument that the membership of the Supreme Court has become increasingly distant from American citizenry in the last several decades. The book posits three primary reasons, all based around the politics and procedures of the judicial nomination process, that explain the increasing divide between the Supreme Court and the citizens that it, in theory, serves. This divide is described as the "democracy gap," which negatively impacts the court's legitimacy. The book is organized into four parts, three of which discuss the reasons why the "democracy gap" has increased; the fourth section offers various conclusions. Simply, the reasons are that Republican presidents who have failed to earn the approval of the majority of the electorate are, with increasing frequency, the ones to nominate justices; the decreasingly representative nature of the appointees along the lines of class, geography, religion, and educational backgrounds; and the impact of the politics of the Supreme Court on presidential and senatorial campaigns. The book's research is meticulous, its argument is persuasive, and its importance is politically imperative.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

Big Money Unleashed builds on Southworth's previous work on legal strategies in campaign finance policy. Significant legal and archival research provides the foundation for rich, focused interviews Southworth (law, Univ. of California) conducts with more than 50 attorneys involved in moving the debate about campaign finance regulation to First Amendment freedom of speech concerns and away from the corruption of the political process or the problem that unfettered political spending poses for citizens wishing to have equal access to the marketplace of ideas. Southworth integrates the work of the conservative legal movement (called "challengers") with that of liberals (referred to as "reformers") who spearheaded the campaign finance reform legislation of the 1970s and 2002. Unlikely bedfellows are found on both sides of the debate, yet the conservatives were successful in reframing the issue through media and legal precedents and helping to create a Supreme Court stacked with their sympathizers. The last chapter thoughtfully speculates on what the next steps might be for both sides. The book is very well written and meticulously documented. Every research library should have a copy.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

One of the nation's most esteemed scholars of US foreign policy writing about the greatest debacle in the post-Cold War era makes for an incredible book. Employing extensive interviews with all the principal players, memoirs, and exhaustive documentary research, Leffler (emer., Univ. of Virginia) overturns many myths about George W. Bush. The author is quite generous and favorable to Bush, demonstrating that despite other commentators' claims, the president was cautious, discerning, and reluctant to go to war. Still, Leffler ultimately concludes that Bush bears responsibility for the dysfunctional advising structure and his refusal to provide the necessary leadership over warring hostile personages and offices. The most egregious offender was the pompous Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who grabbed power, employed it ineffectively, and imposed his narrow perspective on the war and postwar operations. However, many others who engaged in intra-agency rivalries were also at fault. This is a classic study of how not to do policymaking, and future leaders can gain immeasurable value from attention to this failed process. In the vast literature on the Iraq tragedy, this incisive, readable book stands above all others.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Lovett (Australian Catholic Univ.) offers a timely, grim account of how the American political system fails to uphold fundamental democratic values. His approach is both deeply rooted in the literature and approachable, and he makes good use of thought experiments and empirical evidence to build a case. In this account, democracy is valuable because of its tendency to create the conditions for equality and self-rule. However, the American political system flounders because of institutional design, failures of popular control, and the disproportionate power wielded by people in already privileged positions. Additionally, well-documented shortcomings at the individual level, including a lack of knowledge and cognitive biases, detract from the democratic project of allowing equal citizens to engage meaningfully in self-rule. Some of the problems Lovett identifies are new, such as ideological polarization or some citizens' embrace of authoritarianism. Others, such as deficiencies of political knowledge, are perennials that have been measured since the beginnings of the behavioral revolution. Lovett masterfully brings together an enormous body of evidence and theory that will be relevant for serious students of democratic theory and political behavior.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Exquisitely timed to contribute to debates over campus free speech regarding protests against the Gaza war, this forceful brief for free speech maintains that orthodox First Amendment law is better suited to protecting pluralism, orderly change, and democracy than alternatives, including international human rights law. Before delving into abstract analyses of current law's treatment of incitement, hate speech, and misinformation, Glennon (law, Tufts Univ.) reviews how the contemporary legal defense of speech originated, providing a lively narrative replete with biographical and historical detail. The book recognizes new dilemmas presented by speech on social media and suggests rethinking government speech and state action doctrines. Ultimately, however, Glennon reaffirms the validity of adhering to rigorously protective free speech principles. Mary Ann Frank's The Cult of the Constitution (CH, Feb'20, 57-2105) offers a strong, contrary position, but Glennon's insights are fresh and his examples thought-provoking, sometimes even surprising. He refrains from venturing specific policy solutions, but he successfully sets the stage for further inquiry into the challenges of speech regulation on social media, perhaps with more extensive political and economic analysis to match the very persuasive philosophical and legal argumentation of his book.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

Ender (US Military Academy), Kelty (US Air Force Academy), Rohall (Ohio Univ. Eastern), and Matthews (US Military Academy) have done a great service to students, faculty, scholars, and leaders by producing this fine volume. The editors assembled an accomplished group of contributors and revised, updated, and expanded their highly successful first edition (CH, Mar'18, 55-2692). The new work covers 11 social groups presented in three parts. Part 1 covers race, ethnicity, and immigrants, including Native Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, African Americans, immigrants, and noncitizens. Part 2 details sex, sexuality, and gender, including women, lesbian and gay service members, and trans people. Part 3 explores religion, disability, and civilians. As a bonus, each chapter shares a lived experience, highlighting a specific individual who captures the humanity of the particular subject matter in a personal and poignant way. This book combines rigorous research, cogent analysis, and clear writing. The result is a highly engaging book that will prove useful in a variety of courses on the American military. Multidisciplinary, comprehensive, and accessible, this valuable resource is essential reading for anyone interested in how and why both diversity and inclusion matter in the US armed forces.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; general readers; professionals.

In this book, Cameron and Kastellec (both, Princeton Univ.) integrate a wide variety of empirical analytical techniques with theoretical explanations for how and why individuals are chosen for the Supreme Court. The result is an outstanding example of political explanation. Their effort begins with an examination of how choices for the Court have moved from political friendships to legal professionals. This is followed by an analysis of the influence of the media and public opinion. The central portion of the book describes the use of lower court judges as "farm teams" for presidential Court selections and utilizes careful data analysis to plot the move to strong legal skills and dominance of partisan considerations in the selection process. The final section revisits the opening framework as a predictive tool, concluding that the results are mixed. Here, the authors examine term limits for Court judges and urge the need to temper the forces of partisanship in the selection process. Throughout, the book's discussion of the evolution of procedural dynamics is supported by relevant graphs, tables, and surveys. This book will become a classic illustration of the use of empirical analysis for explaining public policy.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

Supreme Bias describes how race, gender, and partisanship interact to produce a two-tiered confirmation process for individuals nominated to the Supreme Court. Drawing on theoretical literature on in-groups and out-groups, the authors mine an "original data set" gleaned from Judiciary Committee hearings that took place between 1939 and 2022. The results are stark. In contrast to other nominees, women and people of color are interrupted more often, engage with senators whose comments are less positive and tinged with doubt, and face a significant number of questions in areas of supposed expertise, such as abortion, gender discrimination, civil rights, and crime. Female nominees also face a disproportionate number of comments that question their competence to serve on the Court. The silver lining to the cloud that the authors investigate comes in their discussion of the increased sensitivity of questioning by senators who participated in the 2018 Blasey Ford-Kavanaugh special session compared to those who participated in the Thomas-Hill hearings in 1991. Their work also suggests that recent trends to diversify the membership of the Judiciary Committee might undermine the biases that infected past hearings. Essential reading for students of the Court.Summing Up: Essential. Undergraduates through faculty; general readers; professionals.

In The Politics of Innocence, the authors provide the particulars of life as an activist--a word this reviewer uses purposefully--working to exonerate the wrongly convicted. The story this book tells describes life in a free society in which decisions have consequences and notions of justice are paramount. Each of the book's five chapters dives into the past, present, and future of innocence-related policies, outlining their history, law, and philosophy. The chapters set the stage for the reader to see the relationship between changing policies and public opinion. This is where activism comes in quite subtly. The authors clearly recognize that the power of innocence-related policies rests in various places across the criminal justice system, including with the people. This work is inspiring and motivational, and is recommended to all readers interested in work on wrongful convictions in general or the value of public opinion in a healthy democracy. It is unlikely that there is another book on this subject that so poignantly captures the frailties of the law and the optimism society needs in order to grapple with wrongful convictions.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

In his 1914 book The Great Society, Graham Wallas warned that the new relationship between people and an increasingly complex, mutable, and enveloping modern environment fostered psychological processes that, if not addressed, would eventually dissolve "those feelings that attach the citizen to a society." In this volume, Schneider (history, Indiana Univ.) makes a compelling case that "the return of resentment" now poses the greatest threat to social cohesion in the US. As the term return suggests, Schneider holds that the importance of resentment as an emotion--which, unlike anger, is relational and "fundamentally reactive in nature"--in shaping political and social relations lapsed during the 20th century when "consensus historians," such as Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset, began to question what Schneider calls "the resentment paradigm." Hofstadter in particular understood Populist movements as fueled by irrational, paranoid, and pathological impulses. Recent scholars, such as Arlie Russell Hochschild, have, however, tried to understand contemporary Populists "on their own terms" by examining the sometimes quite tangible sources of "discontents" among resentful Americans. This is intellectual and political history at its most illuminating and compelling.Summing Up: Essential. Undergraduates through faculty.

The Thinkers is essential reading for understanding the contemporary policy world of national government. With remarkable thoroughness, Fagan (Univ. of Illinois) explores idea generation and use in national policy making. Using several sources of quantitative and qualitative data, he traces the evolution of the Washington agenda from the archaic era (pre-1920) through the technocratic era (1920s to 1970s) to the contemporary partisan era. The central focus of the work is the growth and operation of D.C. think tanks, noting the importance of the rise of the conservative Heritage Foundation and the liberal Center for American Progress in entrenching the current era of partisan analysis in national policy making. Along the way, his data reveal the historical expansion of the national policy agenda and the correlation of the rise of partisan think tank analysis with the polarization of national politics. Fagan also assesses the role of partisan think tanks in party organizations, how such think tanks set their agendas, and how think tanks' focus on more "ideological" issues obstructs national problem-solving. This work contains adept data analysis, revealing case studies, and careful explanation of historical trends. Highly recommended for all students of national politics and policy making.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

What constitutes a crisis in public policy or the political arena? At the heart of this question is who gets resources and government intervention when crises occur? Moreover, it begs the question of what language is used around crises and how that leads to the distribution of resources. Marginalized communities and privileged communities definitely experience crises differently, and this book examines the politics of crises: the processes that structure the relationship between episodic hard times and ongoing hard times that affect the lived experiences of marginalized groups. Strolovitch (Yale Univ.) contends that these differences inform and comprise politics in the 21st century. She contends that the optimistic belief in the potential of major crises to increase the production of goods, services, and political relationships is what fuels this cycle of political activity. Overall, Strolovitch builds a strong case for how privileged communities use and usurp true crises in marginalized communities to gain resources and power. This is a must read for students of economics, public policy, race relations, political science, and sociology.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Fiss (emer., law, Yale Univ.) has produced a rhetorical masterpiece. After powerfully and constructively introducing the first premise of his syllogism--namely that the Constitution mandates a democratic form of government--Fiss shows how forces in US history have built on this mandate. With undeniable skill, Fiss guides his readers through the at times mystifying yet seemingly inexorable logic the Supreme Court has followed to expand the franchise in the face of constitutional arguments around state sovereignty and republican rule. Fiss documents how the court, in a series of decisions beginning in the 1960s, has described the right to vote as "precious or fundamental" and how it became one of the "defining features of a constitutional tradition" that serves to protect "democracy and the political freedom to which it gives rise" (pp. 19-20). The moral urgency with which Fiss presents the topic distinguishes him as an able philosopher of the court. Both the book and the process it describes are a compelling tour de force, and few readers will remain unconvinced by the book's moral conclusions.Summing Up: Essential. General readers, graduate students, and professionals.