Product Description: Successful democracies throughout history--from ancient Athens to Britain on the cusp of the industrial age--have used the technology of their time to gather information for better governance. Our challenge is no different today, but it is more urgent because the accelerating pace of technological change creates potentially enormous dangers as well as benefits...read more

Product Description: The growing exploration of political life from an aesthetic perspective has become so prominent that we can now speak of an "aesthetic turn" in political theory. But what does it mean and why an aesthetic turn? This collection of essays aims to answer such questions from a variety of perspectives, to think in a new way about the possibilities and weaknesses of democratic politics...read more

Popular distrust and the entrenchment of government by professionals lie at the root of America’s most pressing political problems. How did U.S. politics get to this point? Contemporary American politics got much of its shape from the transformations brought about from the 1950s to the 1980s. Presidential and congressional behavior, voting behavior, public opinion, public policy and federalism were all reconfigured during that time and many of those changes persist to this day and structure the political environment in the early twenty-first century. Throughout American history, parties have been a reliable instrument for translating majority preferences into public policy. From the 1950s to the 1980s, a gradual antiparty realignment, alongside the growth of professional government, produced a new American political system of remarkable durability – and remarkable dysfunction. It is a system that is paradoxically stable despite witnessing frequent shifts in party control of the institutions of government at the state and national level. Schier and Eberly's system-level view of American politics demonstrates the disconnect between an increasingly polarized and partisan elite and an increasingly disaffected mass public.

Product Description: Features of this Innovative Text The 8th edition of this well-respected text features the 2014 midterm Congressional elections, the latest on Obama’s presidency, important Supreme Court decisions, the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and other timely updates...read more

The election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States has opened a new chapter in the country’s long and often tortured history of inter-racial and inter-ethnic relations. Many relished in the inauguration of the country’s first African American president ― an event foreseen by another White House aspirant, Senator Robert Kennedy, four decades earlier. What could have only been categorized as a dream in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education was now a reality. Some dared to contemplate a post-racial America. Still, soon after Obama’s election a small but persistent faction questioned his eligibility to hold office; they insisted that Obama was foreign-born. Following the Civil Rights battles of the 20th century hate speech, at least in public, is no longer as free flowing as it had been. Perhaps xenophobia, in a land of immigrants, is the new rhetorical device to assail what which is non-white and hence un-American. Furthermore, recent debates about immigration and racial profiling in Arizona along with the battle over rewriting of history and civics textbooks in Texas suggest that a post-racial America is a long way off. What roles do race, ethnicity, ancestry, immigration status, locus of birth play in the public and private conversations that defy and reinforce existing conceptions of what it means to be American? This book exposes the changing and persistent notions of American identity in the age of Obama. Amílcar Antonio Barreto, Richard L. O’Bryant, and an outstanding line up of contributors examine Obama’s election and reelection as watershed phenomena that will be exploited by the president’s supporters and detractors to engage in different forms of narrating the American national saga. Despite the potential for major changes in rhetorical mythmaking, they question whether American society has changed substantively.

Product Description: The United States and China are arguably the most globally consequential actors of the early twenty first century, and look set to remain so into the foreseeable future. This volume seeks to highlight that American images of China are responsible for constructing certain truths and realities about that country and its people...read more

Policy debates are often grounded within the conceptual confines of a state-market dichotomy, as though the two existed in complete isolation. In this innovative text, Marc Allen Eisner portrays the state and the market as inextricably linked, exploring the variety of institutions subsumed by the market and the role that the state plays in creating the institutional foundations of economic activity. Through a historical approach, Eisner situates the study of American political economy within a larger evolutionary-institutional framework that integrates perspectives in American political development and economic sociology. This volume provides a rich understanding of the complexity of U.S. economic policy, explaining how public policies become embedded in bureaucracy and reinforced by organized beneficiaries and public expectations. This path dependent layering process helps students better understand the underlying historical dynamics, which provide a clearer sense of the constraints faced by policymakers now and in the future. Thorough coverage of the entitlement crisis, globalization’s impact on the U.S. political economy, and the recent financial crisis in the final chapters demonstrate the importance of this historical institutionalist framework.

Through a practical introduction to the policies of the American welfare state―a wide-ranging subject much discussed but seldom described―this concise volume details the four main areas of social welfare policy: housing assistance, nutrition assistance, income assistance, and medical assistance. In plain, approachable language, author Brian Glenn explains, for example, how Section 8 housing vouchers function, what WIC is, the Medicare program, and what Temporary Aid to Needy Families does. It is written in a manner that allows a complete novice to understand these programs in a brisk and comprehensive fashion that is both short enough to assign over a couple of nights in a course and yet detailed enough for the programs to be understood at a quite nuanced level. Due to federalism, many of these programs differ, sometimes dramatically, from locality to locality, and thus in order to understand how these policies function, Glenn looks at the support a poor household would receive in five cities: Boston, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. This covers not only a geographic spread, but also the range of programs from those on the higher end of the spectrum to those at the lowest levels of support, giving the reader a feel for the range of funding levels and also the variety of different ways programs can be implemented. In short, this book is meant to be a handy little teaching and research tool that a professor can assign over a night or two to fill a huge gap in the literature on a subject that many want to teach but lack the knowledge and resources to do.

Product Description: In civil war the causal mechanism on recruitment of combatants is complicated because armed groups interact for context-based strategic. This book argues that a group will adopt varying mobilization strategies depending upon the difference in a group's influence between the stronghold and contested areas, using as examples two Cambodian civil wars...read more

Product Description: Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts is devoted to the recording, summarizing and indexing of astronomical publications throughout the world. Two volumes are scheduled to appear per year. Volume 70 records 13,622 papers covering besides the classical fields of astronomy and astrophysics such matters as space flights related to astronomy, lunar and planetary probes and satellites, meteorites and interplanetary matter, X-rays and cosmic rays, quasars and pulsars...read more

Authority, Ascendancy, and Supremacy examines the American, Chinese, and Russian (Big 3) competition for power and influence in the Post-Cold War Era. With the ascension of regional powers such as India, Iran, Brazil, and Turkey, the Big 3 dynamic is an evolving one, which cannot be ignored because of its effect to not only reshape regional security, but also control influence and power in world affairs. How does one define a "global" or "regional" power in the Post-Cold War Era? How does the relationships among the Big 3 influence regional actors? Gregory O. Hall utilizes country data from primary and secondary sources to reveal that since the early 1990s, competition for influence and power among the Big 3 has intensified and could result in armed confrontation among the major powers. He assesses the state of affairs in each country’s economic, resource, military, social/demographic, and political spheres. In addition, events data, which focuses on international interactions, facilitates identifying trends in Big 3 interactions as well as their concerns and affairs with regional players. Opinion data, drawn from policy makers, scholarly interviews, and survey research data, identifies foreign policy interests among the Big 3, as well non-Big 3 foreign policy behaviors. With its singular focus on American, Chinese, and Russian interactions, policy interests, and behaviors, Authority, Ascendancy, and Supremacy represents a significant contribution for understanding and managing Post-Cold War conflicts and promises to be an important book.

Product Description: Why al Qaeda is winning its war against the West—and America has been playing right into its handsIn the decade since 9/11, the United States has grown weaker: It has been bogged down by costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has spent billions of dollars on security to protect air travel and other transport, as well as the homeland more generally...read more

Product Description: The Brazilian State: Debate and Agenda is part of the Bildner Western Hemisphere Studies Series. This book is a collection of 16 essays from the conference “The Brazilian State: Paths and Prospects of Dirigisme and Liberalization” held at The Graduate Center, City University of New York in November 2009...read more

Product Description: In the past ten to twenty years the global political economy picture has dramatically changed with the emergence of the economies of Brazil, Russia, India and, notably, China (BRICs) as big players and competitors of the advanced economies in the West and Eastern Asia...read more

Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, switchboard operator for the Frequent and Vigorous Publishing Company, tries to cope with her great-grandmother's escape from a nursing home, her insanely jealous but not-too-passionate beau, and a cocatiel that spouts psycho-babble, Auden, and Bible quotations