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This book uses hundreds of hours of newly opened interviews and other sources to illuminate the life and times of Bill Clinton. Combining the authoritative perspective of these inside accounts with the analytic powers of some of America’s most distinguished presidential scholars, the chapters offer a major advance in our collective understanding of the Clinton White House. Included are chapters on the major domestic and foreign policy initiatives of the Clinton years, as well as objective discussions of political success and failure. This is the first book to make extensive use of previously closed interviews collected for the Clinton Presidential History Project, conducted by the Presidential Oral History Program of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. These interviews explored officials’ memories of their service with President Clinton and their careers prior to joining the administration. Interviewees also offered political and leadership lessons they had gleaned as eyewitnesses to and shapers of history. Their spoken recollections provide invaluable detail about the inner history of the presidency in an age when personal diaries and discursive letters are seldom written. The authors had first access to more than fifty of these cleared interviews. The book provides a multidimensional portrait of Bill Clinton’s administration, drawing largely on the observations of those who knew it best.

Access Points develops a new theory about how democratic institutions influence policy outcomes. Access Point Theory argues that the more points of access that institutions provide to interest groups, the cheaper lobbying will be, and, thus, the more lobbying will occur. This will lead to more complex policy, as policymakers insert specific provisions to benefit special interests, and, if one side of the debate has a lobbying advantage, to more biased policy, as the advantaged side is able to better take advantage of the cheaper lobbying. This book then uses Access Point Theory to explain why some countries have more protectionist and more complex trade policies than others; why some countries have stronger environmental and banking regulations than others; and why some countries have more complicated tax codes than others. In policy area after policy area, this book finds that more access points lead to more biased and more complex policy. Access Points provides scholars a powerful tool to explain how political institutions matter and why countries implement the policies they do.

This book explores the wide variation across states in convenience voting methods—absentee/mail voting, in-person early voting, same day registration—and provides new empirical analysis of the beneficial effects of these policies, not only in increasing voter turnout overall, but for disadvantaged groups. By measuring both convenience methods and implementation of the laws, the book improves on previous research. It draws generalizable conclusions about how these laws affect voter turnout by using population data from the fifty state voter files. Using individual vote histories, the design helps avoid bias in non-random assignment of states in adopting the laws. Many scholars and public officials have dismissed state election reform laws as failing to significantly increase turnout or address inequality in who votes. Accessible Elections underscores how state governments can modernize their election procedures to increase voter turnout and influence campaign and party mobilization strategies. Mail voting and in-person early voting are particularly important in the wake of Covid-19 to avoid election day crowds and ensure successful and equitable elections in states with large populations; the results of this study can help state governments more rapidly update voting for the 2020 general election and beyond.

United States officials argued during America’s post-9-/11 wars that the US took every precaution to prevent unintended civilian death and injury — known as collateral damage — due to US military operations. Yet, during the first years of the wars, officials accepted the inevitability of the harm, and tens of thousands of civilians were killed and injured by the US and its allies. The book explores moral responsibility for three kinds of collateral damage incidents. Accidents were unforeseen and sometimes unforeseeable, and arguably they were comparatively rare. More numerous were systemic collateral damage deaths, the foreseeable consequence of rules of engagement, weapons choices, standard operating procedures and military doctrine. Proportionality/double effect collateral damage is foreseeable, and foreseen, yet anticipated military advantages are said to excuse this unintentional killing. Both systemic collateral damage, and proportionality/double effect collateral damage are produced in part by expansive and permissive conceptions of military necessity. The other causes of systemic collateral damage are found in the organization of warmaking — the institutionalized rules, procedures, training, and stresses of war. Depending on choices that are made at the organizational and command level, the likelihood of causing civilian casualties may rise or fall. When those factors, including beliefs about military necessity, change the incidence of collateral damage also changes. This book offers a new way to think about moral agency and accountability. The dominant paradigm of legal and moral responsibility in war stresses both intention and individual accountability. Yet that framework is inadequate for cases of systemic and proportionality/double effect collateral damage because the causes of those deaths and injuries lie at the organizational level — where doctrine, tactics, and weapons are decided. The author supplements theories of individual agency and accountability with a theory of collective moral responsibility, treating organizations as imperfect moral agents. The US military exercised moral agency when it began, mid-way through the Post-9/11 wars, to change its organizational procedures in order reduce collateral damage deaths. The book offers ways to increase political and public moral responsibility for conduct in war.

Passion and emotion run deep in politics, but researchers have only recently begun to study how they influence our political thinking. Contending that the long-standing neglect of such feelings has left unfortunate gaps in the understanding of political behavior, this book provides a comprehensive overview of current research on emotion in politics and where it is likely to lead. In sixteen chapters, thirty scholars approach this topic from an array of angles that address four major themes. The first section outlines the philosophical and neuroscientific foundations of emotion in politics, while the second focuses on how emotions function within and among individuals. The final two sections branch out to explore how politics work at the societal level and suggest the next steps in modeling, research, and political activity itself.

The past few decades have witnessed the growth of movements that use digital means to connect with broader publics and express their point of view. Social media facilitate feelings of engagement, in ways that frequently make people feel reenergized about what it means to be political. In doing so, media do not make or break revolutions but they do lend emerging, storytelling publics their own means for feeling their way into the developing event, frequently by making them a part of the developing story. Digital technologies network us but it is our stories that connect us to each other, making us feel close to some and distancing us from others. Affective Publics explores how storytelling practices on Twitter facilitate affective engagement for publics tuning into a current issue or event by employing three case studies: Arab Spring movements, various iterations of Occupy, and everyday casual political expressions as traced through the archives of trending topics on Twitter.

The United States boasts scores of organizations that offer crucial representation for groups that are marginalized in national politics, from women to racial minorities to the poor. This systematic study of these organizations explores the challenges and opportunities they face in the new millennium, as waning legal discrimination coincides with increasing political and economic inequalities within the populations they represent. Drawing on data from a survey of 286 organizations and interviews with forty officials, the author finds that groups too often prioritize the interests of their most advantaged members: male rather than female racial minorities, for example, or affluent rather than poor women. But she also finds that many organizations try to remedy this inequity, and concludes by distilling their best practices into a set of principles that she calls affirmative advocacy—a form of representation that aims to overcome the entrenched but often subtle biases against people at the intersection of more than one marginalized group.

What happened to black youth in the post-civil rights generation? What kind of causes did they rally around and were they even rallying in the first place? This book takes a close look at a variety of key civil rights groups across the country over the last forty years to provide a broad view of black youth and social movement activism. It examines popular mobilization among the generation of activists—principally black students, youth, and young adults—who came of age after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The book argues that the political environment in the post-civil rights era, along with constraints on social activism, made it particularly difficult for young black activists to start and sustain popular mobilization campaigns. Building on case studies from around the country—including New York, the Carolinas, California, Louisiana, and Baltimore—the book explores the inner workings and end results of activist groups such as the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Student Organization for Black Unity, the Free South Africa Campaign, the New Haven Youth Movement, the Black Student Leadership Network, the Juvenile Justice Reform Movement, and the AFL-CIO's Union Summer campaign. It demonstrates how youth-based movements and intergenerational campaigns have attempted to circumvent modern constraints, providing insight into how the very inner workings of these organizations have and have not been effective in creating change and involving youth.

Drawing on collaborative research from a team at Harvard and Manchester universities, this book asks how two very different societies are responding to the tide of diversity that is being felt around the rich world. Injustice, it turns out, still blights the lives of many UK and US minorities – particularly African Americans – and there are signs that the new diversity strains community life. Yet in both countries, public opinion is running irreversibly in favour of tolerance. That augurs well for the future – and suggests that a British Obama cannot be ruled out.

This book looks at change in party fortunes in presidential elections since 1972, documenting the magnitude, direction, and consequences of changes in party support in the states. It finds that the Democrats do not have a “lock” on the Electoral College, but that their position has improved dramatically over the past forty years in a number of formerly competitive or Republican-leaning states in the Northeast, Southeast, and Southwest. Republican candidates have made many fewer gains, mostly improving their position in “misplaced,” formerly Democratic states, such as Kentucky and West Virginia, or in already deeply Republican states in the Plains and Mountain West. The book looks at the ways that changes in the racial and ethnic composition of the state electorates, internal (state to state) and external (foreign born) migratory patterns, and changes in other key demographic and political characteristics drive these changes. Additionally, it explores the ways in which increasing partisan polarization at the national level has altered group-based party linkages and contributed to changes in party support at the state level. These factors, along with an increasingly inefficient distribution of Republican votes, have converted what was once a Republican edge in electoral votes to an advantage for Democratic presidential candidates.

This is a book about the necessity of political ambition for the success of American democracy. Democracies face an enduring problem encouraging, harnessing, and inevitably restraining the passions citizens have to wield political power in a civic forum. This book describes how evolving American political institutions and forms of association struggle to inspire, guide, and constrain the ambition of citizens to rule within American politics. This book sheds light on the way power seeking behavior in America ends up transforming—and often undermining—the ways democracies attempt to hold the socially and politically powerful accountable. Ambition—the desire to rule—while often seen as a threat to the stability of republican self-government, actually plays a vital, though previously underexplored, role in sustaining a healthy polity. This book explores how relationships between the mechanisms of restraint and the ambitions of specific public figures and movements enhance or undermine the possibility of self-government.

Texas has created more constitutional law than any other state. In any classroom nationwide, any basic constitutional law course can be taught using nothing but Texas cases. That, however, understates the history and politics behind the cases. Beyond representing all doctrinal areas of constitutional law, Texas cases deal with the major issues of the nation. This book charts the rich and pervasive development of Texas-inspired constitutional law. From voting rights to railroad regulations, school finance to capital punishment, poverty to civil liberty, this book provides a window into the relationship between constitutional litigation and ordinary politics at the Texas Supreme Court, illuminating how all of the fiercest national divides over what the Constitution means took shape in Texas.

Federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities have gained widespread attention in recent years because of the 2008 financial crisis, but issues of government credit have been part of American life since the nation's founding. From the 1780s, when a watershed national land credit policy was established, to the postwar foundations of our current housing finance system, this book examines the evolution of securitization and federal credit programs. The book shows that since the Westward expansion, the US government has used financial markets to manage America's complex social divides, and politicians and officials across the political spectrum have turned to land sales, home ownership, and credit to provide economic opportunity without the appearance of market intervention or direct wealth redistribution. Highly technical systems, securitization, and credit programs have been fundamental to how Americans determined what they could and should owe one another. Over time, government officials embraced credit as a political tool that allowed them to navigate an increasingly complex and fractured political system, affirming the government's role as a consequential and creative market participant. Neither intermittent nor marginal, credit programs supported the growth of powerful industries, from railroads and farms to housing and finance; have been used for disaster relief, foreign policy, and military efforts; and were promoters of amortized mortgages, lending abroad, venture capital investment, and mortgage securitization. Illuminating America's market-heavy social policies, this book illustrates how political institutions became involved in the nation's lending practices.

Conspiracies theories are some of the most striking features in the American political landscape: the Kennedy assassination, aliens at Roswell, subversion by Masons, Jews, Catholics, or communists, and modern movements like Birtherism and Trutherism. But what do we really know about conspiracy theories? Do they share general causes? Are they becoming more common? More dangerous? Who is targeted and why? Who are the conspiracy theorists? How has technology affected conspiracy theorizing? This book draws on three sources of original, systematic, data—120,000 letters to the editor of the New York Times and Chicago Tribune from 1890 and 2010, a two-wave survey around the 2012 presidential election, and a representative sample of Internet discussions—to offer the first century-long view of these issues. Many popular explanations find little support, but an explicitly political explanation fares well. To succeed, conspiracy theories need to follow a strategic logic that mirrors shifts in power. From this perspective, conspiracy theories are a form of threat perception that tracks foreign and domestic power asymmetries to focus attention, integrate groups, and recover from setbacks.

American society may be hostile to the thought of ideologies, but it possesses a sophisticated but little understood ability to engage in deep conflicts over political ideas, while at the same time reducing adversarial positions to legitimate derivatives of American history and development. This book asks how this occurs; how the sources, traditions, and usages of core ideas and their derivative compounds animate political discourse and structure the basis of political conflict; and how it is possible to sustain a high incidence of competitive value-laden argument and principled political conflict within a stable political order. The fundamental aim of this book is to examine the traditions and usages of American political ideas within the arena of practical politics. By locating them in their respective contexts, it is possible to assess both their changing meanings and their shifting relationships to one another. In surveying America's core ideas, the book facilitates an informed awareness of their political and cultural leverage as forms of persuasion and sources of legitimacy. The book roots the examination of American political ideas firmly in the milieu of social drives, political movements, and contemporary issues within which the ideas themselves are embedded. This not only allows the study to investigate the interior properties and traditional priorities of America's key values, but permits the theoretical implications and practical consequences of these ideas to be traced and evaluated.

The book explores the breakdown of the elite consensus on America's role in the world. By emphasising military restraint and 'leading from behind' President Obama challenged the Washington foreign policy establishment and its strategic vision of liberal hegemony from within.Highlighting the identity performing function and discursive construction of grand strategy, the book demonstrates how the geopolitical identity of American exceptionalism is linked to the conduct of an activist and interventionist foreign policy, resulting in a dominant grand strategy of American primacy and global military pre-eminence. An intertextual framework of analysis is used to examine the political performance and validity of this dominant identity-policy link, and the success of countering discourses of cooperative engagement and restraint under the Obama presidency. The nexus of geopolitical identity and national security is traced through a multidimensional perspective that considers the common sense status of popular culture and media, the expertise of Washington think tanks and foreign policy experts, and the political decisions taken in the White House and the Pentagon.From an in-depth analysis of various competing discourses of national security and foreign policy, the book concludes that American grand strategy under Obama no longer represented a coherent and consistent equation of material resources and political ends, but a contested discursive space, where identity and policy no longer matched. This resulted in the conflicted and contradictory nature of the Obama Doctrine.

This book brings together twenty-plus contributors from the fields of law, economics, and international relations to look at whether the U.S. legal system is contributing to the country's long postwar decline. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the interactions between economics and the law in such areas as corruption, business regulation, and federalism. It explains how the U.S. legal system works differently to those in most countries, with contradictory and hard-to-understand business regulations, tort laws that vary from state to state, and surprising judicial interpretations of clearly written contracts. This imposes far heavier litigation costs on American companies and hampers economic growth.

Only the right has recognized the potency of the American left. The book explains why others have underestimated the left in the USA, citing the relative absence of a free press in America, the disposition of the left to deny its own existence in the name of pragmatism, and the left’s fallacy that the right is always wrong, and thus in error in pointing to the left’s impact. The book sets forth the achievements of the left. These achievements include the welfare state, critiques of and sometimes effective opposition to militarism, the reshaping of American culture, crusades for black rights and civil liberties, the awakening of America to the dangers of fascism, and great public enterprizes such as the New York and New Jersey Port Authority. The book shows how the socialists of the Old Left gave way by the 1960s to the anti-war militants of the New Left, and how they in turn gave way to a “Newer Left” that advocated a host of additional causes such as gay rights and multiculturalism. Final chapters show how the post-2000 Bush administration succumbed to the “socialist” nationalization it professed to condemn, and how Barack Obama was a president for the left.

The book explores the impact of uncertainty in the national campaign context on nonvoting in presidential and midterm House elections from 1920 through 2012. While previous studies have focused on individuals' motivations to vote and candidates' mobilization efforts, this book considers how uncertain national circumstances in the months before the election affect whether people vote or not. Uncertainty is defined as decision makers being unable to accurately predict future conditions, possible options, or final outcomes based on the current situation. Within the national campaign context, uncertainty arises from economic volatility, technological advances in mass communication, dramatic national events including wars, and changes in suffrage requirements. The book examines this uncertainty across four historical periods: the government expansion period (1920–1944), the post-war period (1946–1972), the government reassessment period (1974–1990), the internet technology period (1992–2012). The book considers the nature of politics during these periods with key occurrences including the economic swings of the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, the post-World War II boom, and the Great Recession, voting rights for women, African-Americans, and young people, and the effects of radio, television, cable television, and the Internet on nonvoting. It concludes that the higher the degree of uncertainty in the national scene, the more likely eligible voters will go to the polls. Conversely, the lower the degree of uncertainty, as the national scene remains stable, the less likely eligible voters will participate. As one example, throughout all four historical periods, economic change decreases nonvoting, while economic stability increases nonvoting.

Despite the centrality of separation of church and state in American government, religion has played an important role in the nation's politics from colonial times through the present day. This essential anthology provides a fascinating history of religion in American politics and public life through a wide range of primary documents. It explores contentious debates over freedom, tolerance, and justice, in matters ranging from slavery to the nineteenth-century controversy over Mormon polygamy to the recent discussions concerning same-sex marriage and terrorism. Bringing together a diverse range of voices from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and secular traditions and the words of historic personages, from Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Frances Willard to John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., this collection is an invaluable introduction to one of the most important conversations in America's history.