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The complicated history of how America elects presidents and why this matters to the next election An engaging mix of history and political science, Distorting Democracy will awaken Americans to the perils of our system by unveiling the Electoral College’s origins, history, and current problems. This book demonstrates that the system has no principled foundation, that it has changed dramatically over its 230–year history, and that it now threatens the legitimacy of our political system. The book is divided into three ground-breaking sections: Part I tells the story of the Electoral College’s origins in the Constitutional Convention. Defenders of the Electoral College tend to invoke gauzy images of the Founding Fathers infusing our system with their unique, timeless wisdom. But history tells a very different story. The Founding Fathers faced a mess; they responded by creating a mess. Part II traces two hundred years of innovations—many of them subtle but highly consequential—to the plan described in the Constitution. As the new nation rapidly descended into bitter political conflict, many of the framers themselves, driven by their partisan interests, massaged the Electoral College into a form that differed profoundly from their founding intentions. Subsequent generations tinkered similarly with the systems’ possibilities, always exploiting its potential for political gain. Part III examines how our strange presidential election system has produced frustrating results with increasing frequency in recent elections. Who can forget the Bush-Gore contest of 2000, when the results hinged on “hanging chads” and fewer than 1,500 votes in Florida? Americans endured weeks of a single-state recount, only to have the Supreme Court halt the process and hand the election to George W. Bush. Bush won the Electoral College by a single vote, but Al Gore captured 500,000 more popular votes. Then, in 2016, Donald Trump stunned the world with a substantial Electoral College victory of 302-227, though nearly 3 million more Americans preferred his opponent, and roughly 7 million voted for a third-party candidate.The system increasingly returns results that conflict with the expressed wishes of a majority of voters, a product of our hyper-polarized landscape and unique geopolitical distribution of party loyalists. The system cannot improve until we learn the complicated history of the Electoral College and the lessons it holds for us today. "Every American should read this book. It brings facts and clarity to a debate that too often relies on conjecture about the Electoral College’s purposes and ill-informed arguments about how it actually operates. The lessons herein are immense." -- Joshua A. Douglas, Ashland, Inc-Spears Distinguished Research Professor of Law, University of Kentucky
High-profile controversies surrounding the funding of political parties have shown how inequalities in wealth can enter the political process. The growth of the professional lobbying of MPs and the executive raises similar questions about money in politics. More broadly, inequalities emerge in terms of the opportunities the public have to participate in political debate. This analysis of the ways wealth can be used to influence politics in Britain explores the threat posed to the principle of political equality. As well as examining lobbying and party funding, the discussion also focuses on the ownership and control of the media, the chance to be heard on the internet and the impact of the privatisation of public spaces on rights to assemble and protest. Looking at this range of political activities, the author proposes various strategies designed to protect the integrity of British democracy and stop inequalities in wealth becoming inequalities in politics.
The ongoing News International phonehacking scandal has made abundantly clear that the media's influence over politics is both immense and largely hidden from public scrutiny. As the scandal grows, a question arises: even when they stay on the right side of the law, to what extent do the media influence the political process? In Democracy under Attack, one of the media's own--Malcolm Dean, the Guardian's long-standing chief monitor of social policy--expertly indicts his fellow journalists, revealing the ways their distorted coverage undermines democracy. Based on four decades of upperlevel UK government briefings and interviews with over one hundred senior policy makers, Democracy under Attack overflows with incisive observations and colorful stories, culminating in a damning list of the seven deadly sins of modern journalists. Dean's long experience and insider status inform his detailed and disturbing account of news production in Britain, revealing the connections between what goes on in newsrooms, lobbyists' offices, and Parliament as well as how those connections decisively shape government policy.
Learn how the perception of truth has been weaponized in modern politics with this "insightful" account of propaganda in Russia and beyond during the age of disinformation (New York Times). When information is a weapon, every opinion is an act of war. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality. In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we've lost not only our grip on peace and democracy -- but our very notion of what those words even mean. Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age, where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, "behavioral change" salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia -- but the answers he finds there are not what he expected. Blending reportage, family history, and intellectual adventure, This Is Not Propaganda explores how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves when reality seems to be coming apart.
A collection of essays by leading politicians, journalists, and academics that show how the Electoral College is embedded in the fabric of our constitutional system and cannot easily be changed without disturbing the whole framework.
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year An Atlantic Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Politics Book of the Year How a new breed of dictators holds power by manipulating information and faking democracy Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world. In place of overt, mass repression, rulers such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Viktor Orbán control their citizens by distorting information and simulating democratic procedures. Like spin doctors in democracies, they spin the news to engineer support. Uncovering this new brand of authoritarianism, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman explain the rise of such “spin dictators,” describing how they emerge and operate, the new threats they pose, and how democracies should respond. Spin Dictators traces how leaders such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Peru’s Alberto Fujimori pioneered less violent, more covert, and more effective methods of monopolizing power. They cultivated an image of competence, concealed censorship, and used democratic institutions to undermine democracy, all while increasing international engagement for financial and reputational benefits. The book reveals why most of today’s authoritarians are spin dictators—and how they differ from the remaining “fear dictators” such as Kim Jong-un and Bashar al-Assad, as well as from masters of high-tech repression like Xi Jinping. Offering incisive portraits of today’s authoritarian leaders, Spin Dictators explains some of the great political puzzles of our time—from how dictators can survive in an age of growing modernity to the disturbing convergence and mutual sympathy between dictators and populists like Donald Trump.
This book explores China’s engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean as a case study of its broader effort to use commercial tools and instruments of state to create a global economic order that functions to its benefit, while neutralizing challenges from institutions, states, and others that would oppose it. Unlike the common representation of the Cold War as a political-military struggle, this work uniquely examines China’s current efforts as primarily seeking to dominate global value chains, with supporting political, technological, and military components. In this regard, it both leverages and goes beyond works based on dependency theory, which has played a key role in the academic and popular discourse in the region. The book examines evidence for China’s economically-focused strategy within Latin America and the Caribbean, including the interrelationships and coordination between China’s activities in different sectors, and between commercial, political, and other dimensions in the region. It further looks at the supporting role played by a diverse range of Chinese initiatives, from China’s Belt and Road initiative, to people-to-people diplomacy, soft power, security engagement, and the PRC struggle with Taiwan for diplomatic recognition in the region, among others. The book highlights the implications for Latin America and the Caribbean, and for the U.S. whose prosperity and security is intimately tied to the region.
The first modern history of the 1975 European referendum, ranging across 1970s Britain to assess why voters said 'Yes to Europe'.
Campaign financing is one of today’s most divisive political issues. The left asserts that the electoral process is rife with corruption. The right protests that the real aim of campaign limits is to suppress political activity and protect incumbents. Meanwhile, money flows freely on both sides. In Plutocrats United, Richard Hasen argues that both left and right avoid the key issue of the new Citizens United era: balancing political inequality with free speech. The Supreme Court has long held that corruption and its appearance are the only reasons to constitutionally restrict campaign funds. Progressives often agree but have a much broader view of corruption. Hasen argues for a new focus and way forward: if the government is to ensure robust political debate, the Supreme Court should allow limits on money in politics to prevent those with great economic power from distorting the political process.
America faces daunting problems—stagnant wages, high health care costs, neglected schools, deteriorating public services. How did we get here? Through decades of dysfunctional government. In Democracy in America? veteran political observers Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens marshal an unprecedented array of evidence to show that while other countries have responded to a rapidly changing economy by helping people who’ve been left behind, the United States has failed to do so. Instead, we have actually exacerbated inequality, enriching corporations and the wealthy while leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves. What’s the solution? More democracy. More opportunities for citizens to shape what their government does. To repair our democracy, Page and Gilens argue, we must change the way we choose candidates and conduct our elections, reform our governing institutions, and curb the power of money in politics. By doing so, we can reduce polarization and gridlock, address pressing challenges, and enact policies that truly reflect the interests of average Americans. Updated with new information, this book lays out a set of proposals that would boost citizen participation, curb the power of money, and democratize the House and Senate.