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Public opinion is one of the most elusive and complex concepts in democratic theory, and we do not fully understand its role in the political process. Reading Public Opinion offers one provocative approach for understanding how public opinion fits into the empirical world of politics. In fact, Susan Herbst finds that public opinion, surprisingly, has little to do with the mass public in many instances. Herbst draws on ideas from political science, sociology, and psychology to explore how three sets of political participants—legislative staffers, political activists, and journalists—actually evaluate and assess public opinion. She concludes that many political actors reject "the voice of the people" as uninformed and nebulous, relying instead on interest groups and the media for representations of public opinion. Her important and original book forces us to rethink our assumptions about the meaning and place of public opinion in the realm of contemporary democratic politics.
Political theorist Michael Walzer's classic guide is a perfect introduction to social activism, including what-to-do advice for deciding which issues to take on, organizing, fundraising, and providing effective leadership Political Action is a how-to book for activists that was written at one of the darkest moments of the Nixon administration and remains no less timely and intelligent and useful today. Michael Walzer draws on his extensive engagement in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s to lay out the practical steps necessary to keep movement politics alive both in victory and in defeat. What do people need to do when out of outrage or fear of looming disaster they come together to demand change? Should they focus on one or several issues? Should they form coalitions? What can and can’t be accomplished through electoral politics? How can movements operate democratically? What is effective leadership? Walzer addresses such questions with clarity, concision, wisdom, and wit in a book that everywhere insists not only on the centrality of movement politics to the health of democratic societies but on the deep satisfaction that is to be found there. Political Action is both an indispensable resource for activists and a lasting and inspiring summons to arms.
Scholars and activists investigate the emergence of a distinctively Latin American environmental justice movement, offering analysis and case studies that illustrate the connections between popular environmental mobilization and social justice in the region.
In Governing for the Long Term, Alan M. Jacobs investigates the conditions under which elected governments invest in long-term social benefits at short-term social cost. Jacobs contends that, along the path to adoption, investment-oriented policies must surmount three distinct hurdles to future-oriented state action: a problem of electoral risk, rooted in the scarcity of voter attention; a problem of prediction, deriving from the complexity of long-term policy effects; and a problem of institutional capacity, arising from interest groups' preferences for distributive gains over intertemporal bargains. Testing this argument through a four-country historical analysis of pension policymaking, the book illuminates crucial differences between the causal logics of distributive and intertemporal politics and makes a case for bringing trade-offs over time to the center of the study of policymaking.
A brilliant condemnation of political hobbyism—treating politics like entertainment—and a call to arms for well-meaning, well-informed citizens who consume political news, but do not take political action. Who is to blame for our broken politics? The uncomfortable answer to this question starts with ordinary citizens with good intentions. We vote (sometimes) and occasionally sign a petition or attend a rally. But we mainly “engage” by consuming politics as if it’s a sport or a hobby. We soak in daily political gossip and eat up statistics about who’s up and who’s down. We tweet and post and share. We crave outrage. The hours we spend on politics are used mainly as pastime. Instead, we should be spending the same number of hours building political organizations, implementing a long-term vision for our city or town, and getting to know our neighbors, whose votes will be needed for solving hard problems. We could be accumulating power so that when there are opportunities to make a difference—to lobby, to advocate, to mobilize—we will be ready. But most of us who are spending time on politics today are focused inward, choosing roles and activities designed for our short-term pleasure. We are repelled by the slow-and-steady activities that characterize service to the common good. In Politics Is for Power, pioneering and brilliant data analyst Eitan Hersh shows us a way toward more effective political participation. Aided by political theory, history, cutting-edge social science, as well as remarkable stories of ordinary citizens who got off their couches and took political power seriously, this book shows us how to channel our energy away from political hobbyism and toward empowering our values.
A thoroughly updated and substantially expanded edition of an acclaimed anthology This is a thoroughly updated and substantially expanded new edition of one of the most popular, wide-ranging, and engaging anthologies of Western political thinking, one that spans from antiquity to the twenty-first century. In addition to the majority of the pieces that appeared in the original edition, this new edition features exciting new selections from more recent thinkers who address vital contemporary issues, including identity, cosmopolitanism, global justice, and populism. Organized chronologically, the anthology brings together a fascinating array of writings--including essays, book excerpts, speeches, and other documents—that have indelibly shaped how politics and society are understood. Each chronological section and thinker is presented with a brief, lucid introduction, making this a valuable reference as well as reader. A thoroughly updated and substantially expanded edition of an acclaimed anthology of political thought Features a wide range of thinkers, including Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Christine de Pizan, Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Swift, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Jefferson, Burke, Olympes de Gouges, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, Mill, de Tocqueville, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Marx, Nietzsche, Lenin, John Dewey, Gaetano Mosca, Roberto Michels, Weber, Emma Goldman, Freud, Einstein, Mussolini, Arendt, Hayek, Franklin D. Roosevelt, T. H. Marshall, Orwell, Leo Strauss, de Beauvoir, Fanon, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Havel, Fukuyama, Mitchell Cohen, Habermas, Foucault, Rawls, Nozick, Walzer, Iris Marion Young, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Amartya Sen, and Jan-Werner Müller Includes brief introductions for each thinker
In recent years, the practice of teaching political theory through literature and the arts has become widespread. Taken together, the essays in this book, written by 9 prominent practitioners, review the state of the art in this emerging field, dealing with the general nature of connections between political theory and literature and visual arts, with an eye to its political content and meaning. The contributors consider what makes a literary work political, political values and literature, literature, politics and feminism and the way in which particular novels comment on political thought and behaviour. A particular focus of the volume is the way in which political ideas particular to the American political culture are expressed in American novels - both in classic works and in modern novels and popular fiction.
A memoir about restoring the health of our people, and our democracy, from a physician and “one of the brightest young stars” of the progressive movement (Sen. Bernie Sanders). A child of immigrants, Abdul El-Sayed grew up feeling a responsibility to help others. He threw himself into the study of medicine and excelled—winning a Rhodes Scholarship, earning two advanced degrees, and landing a tenure-track position at Columbia University. At thirty, he became the youngest city health official in America, tasked with rebuilding Detroit’s health department after years of austerity policies. But El-Sayed found himself disillusioned. He could heal the sick—even build healthier, safer communities—but that wouldn’t address the social and economic conditions causing illness in the first place. So he left health for politics, running for Governor of Michigan and earning the support of progressive champions like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders. This memoir traces the life of a young idealist, weaving together powerful personal stories and fascinating forays into history and science. Marrying his unique perspective with the science of epidemiology, El-Sayed diagnoses an underlying epidemic afflicting our country, an epidemic of insecurity. And to heal the rifts this epidemic has created, he lays out a new direction for the progressive movement. This is a bold, personal, and compellingly original book from a prominent young leader. “In Healing Politics, Abdul El-Sayed doesn’t just diagnose the causes of our broken politics; he gives us a prescription and treatment plan.” —Representative Pramila Jayapal
One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant of politics and government. Often, many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This may be rational, but it creates a nation of people with little political knowledge and little ability to objectively evaluate what they do know. In Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin mines the depths of ignorance in America and reveals the extent to which it is a major problem for democracy. Somin weighs various options for solving this problem, arguing that political ignorance is best mitigated and its effects lessened by decentralizing and limiting government. Somin provocatively argues that people make better decisions when they choose what to purchase in the market or which state or local government to live under, than when they vote at the ballot box, because they have stronger incentives to acquire relevant information and to use it wisely.