Books in the American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law series

Samantha Majic investigates the way two San Francisco-based nonprofit organizations negotiate their governmental obligations while maintaining their commitment to outreach and advocacy for sex workers' rights as well as broader socio-political change.

Race and the Making of American Political Science shows that racial thought was central to the academic study of politics in the United States at its origins, shaping the discipline's core categories and questions in fundamental and lasting ways.

Electoral Capitalism brings new perspective to the crisis of inequality during the Gilded Age. Examining how party leaders governed by accumulating wealth through the spoils system, Broxmeyer places in historical context debates over capitalism and democracy that continue to resonate today.

In Divided Unions, Alexis N. Walker argues that excluding public sector workers from the foundation of U.S. labor law, the Wagner Act of 1935, created divisions within the labor movement that have had lasting consequences for the size, strength, and influence of organized labor in American politics.

Political Advocacy and Its Interested Citizens looks at how and why the imperatives of political advocacy have transformed social movements. Using LGBT political movements in the United States as a case study, Matthew Dean Hindman explores the impact neoliberalism has on interest groups' efforts to bring citizens into the political arena.

Struggles to define the soul of America roil the nation''s politics. Debates over the roles of gays, lesbians, women, immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and disputes over reproductive and abortion rights serve as rallying points for significant electoral groups and their representatives in government. Although the American family lies at the core of these fierce battles, the alignment of family with social or cultural issues is only a partial picture—a manifestation of the new right''s late twentieth-century success in elevating "family values" over family economics.Gwendoline Alphonso makes a significant contribution to the prevailing understanding of party evolution, contemporary political polarization, and the role of the family in American political development by placing family at the center of political and cultural clashes. She demonstrates how regional ideas about family in the twentieth century have continually shaped not only Republican and Democratic policy and ideological positions concerning race and gender but also their ideals concerning the economy and the state. Drawing on extensive data from congressional committee hearings, political party platforms, legislation sponsorship, and demographic data from the Progressive, post-World War II, and late twentieth-century periods in the United States, Polarized Families, Polarized Parties offers an intricate and sophisticated analysis of how deliberations around the ideal family became critical to characterizations of party politics. By revealing the deep historical interconnections between family and the two parties'' ideologies and policy preferences, Alphonso reveals that American party development is more than a story of the state and its role in the economy but also, at its core, a debate over the political values of family and the social fabric it embodies.

Examining the history of rap music, particularly the subgenre of political rap, and coupling public opinion research with lyrical analysis, Lakeyta M. Bonnette illustrates the ways rap music serves as a vehicle for the expression and advancement of political thought in urban Black communities.

Displacing Democracy demonstrates how neighborhoods segregated along economic lines create conditions encouraging high levels of political activity, including civic and political mobilization and voting, among wealthier citizens while simultaneously discouraging and impeding the poor from similar forms of civic engagement.

Becoming Bureaucrats investigates the identities and motivations of two sets of public servants: police officers and welfare caseworkers. The book argues that who bureaucrats become and how bureaucracies function depends strongly on patterns of self-selection and recruitment.

Drawing on American political development's rich theoretical tradition and historical perspective in order to better understand how long-term institutional and ideational developments have shaped the Trump presidency, this volume offers broad reflections on the future of American institutions in a time of considerable social change.

James M. Glaser and Timothy J. Ryan vividly show how political strategies can counteract the impulse to think about racial issues in terms of winners and losers. Their problem-focused research shows how communities can build majority support for minority interests, even in the face of emotionally charged group conflicts.

What determines the interests, ideologies, and alliances that make up political parties? In its entire history, the United States has had only a handful of party transformations. First to the Party concludes that groups like unions and churches, not voters or politicians, are the most consistent influences on party transformation.

In this original analysis of political communication, Keena Lipsitz argues that highly contested electoral battles create campaign information environments that allow citizens to make enlightened choices.

Statebuilding from the Margins addresses often overlooked cases of Progressive Era policy shifts in which private citizens and civic organizations forged hybrid institutions and state alliances to enact change in arenas such as Prohibition, citizenship, animal and waste management, and housing policy.

In American Marriage, Priscilla Yamin argues that marriage is a political institution to which actors turn either to stave off or to promote change over issues of race, gender, class, or sexuality. In the political struggle, certain marriages are pushed as necessary for the good of society, while others are contested or prevented.

In Civil Rights Advocacy on Behalf of the Poor, Catherine M. Paden examines five civil rights organizations and explores why they chose to represent the poor-specifically, low-income African Americans-during six legislative periods considering welfare reform.

The Workfare State recounts the history of the evolving social contract for poor families from the New Deal to the present. Challenging conventional accounts, Eva Bertram argues that conservative Southern Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s led the way in developing the modern workfare state, well before Republican campaigns in the 1980s.