New Books in American Politics

With years of experience as the Representative of the Fourth District in North Carolina, as an educator, a writer, and a political scientist, David Price examines the last 45 years of politics in the United States Congress, in North Carolina, and in his life as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Representative Price currently serves as Chairman of the House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee, and he is also the Chair of the House Democracy Partnership, which we discuss during the podcast interview. The Congressional Experience begins with Price’s personal anecdote of the progression of his career as a politician so as to provide a fuller look into the life of a member of Congress. Following the subtitle of the book, “an institution transformed,” Price opens the conversation about how the U.S. Congress has developed over time, through the Cold War, the economic successes of the 1990’s, international terrorism, recession, the Obama and Trump administrations, and through a global pandemic. Price also brings into focus the changes in the ways that Congress functions because of the increased political polarization in the United States. 

The Congressional Experience: An Institution Transformed (Routledge, 2020) outlines the complex issues that the U.S. Congress, and the American government in general, regularly faces, in both the domestic and the international sphere. But Price’s approach to explaining these policy processes and complexities is through an intimate picture of how Congress works. Price unpacks the political polarization between executive and legislative government—especially during periods of divided government, and how that has drastically changed citizens’ opinion of the U.S. governmental system from admiration to contempt. In his efforts as a member of Congress, as a representative of the people in North Carolina’s 4th District, and as a political scientist, Price works to alter the perceptions of government in The Congressional Experience. His hope is that readers will have a better understanding of the fundamentals of government, the way that the institutions function, and how those who are elected to public office work within these political institutions. Given the shifts over the years, members have become more entrepreneurial, pursuing different goals and outcomes, some tied to the original roles and responsibilities of elected office holders, others tied to opportunities that might be pursued after leaving public office. Price stresses the need for citizens to understand how political institutions were designed to work, and to hold their elected official responsible for making decisions on their behalf while in Washington, D.C. This is a truly fascinating textbook about the U.S. Congress, since it weaves together Price’s decades of experiences in the U.S. House, as well as his expertise not only as a member of the House, but also as a political scientist. The Congressional Experience: An Institution Transformed provides a unique perspective on the U.S. Congress, especially during this period of institutional transition while also magnifying the importance of local government.

Shaina Boldt assisted with the production of this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

To many observers, Congress has become a deeply partisan institution where ideologically-distinct political parties do little more than engage in legislative trench warfare. A zero-sum, winner-take-all approach to congressional politics has replaced the bipartisan comity ofpast eras. If the parties cannot get everything they want in national policymaking, then they prefer gridlock and stalemate to compromise. Or, at least, that is the conventional wisdom.

In The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era (U Chicago Press, 2020), James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee challenge this conventional wisdom. By constructing legislative histories of congressional majority parties’attempts to enact their policy agendas in every congress since the 1980s and by drawing on interviews with Washington insiders, the authors analyze the successes and failures of congressional parties to enact their legislative agendas. Their conclusions will surprise many congressional observers: Even in our time of intense party polarization, bipartisanship remains the key to legislative success on Capitol Hill.

Frances E. Lee is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. James Curry is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. Their book, The Limits of Party, won the American Political Science Association's Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book in the field of US national policy.

Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett.

Robinson Woodward-Burns is the author of Hidden Laws: How the State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics, published by Yale University Press in 2021. Hidden Laws explores the relationship between both state and national constitutional development, debates, and reform. A sprawling study of American constitutional history, Woodward-Burns’s book shows how the federal government often deferred to state constitutional reform as a mechanism for dealing with national constitutional controversies. From banking to slavery, women’s suffrage to welfare, Woodward-Burns explores the myriad of ways constitutional controversies were debated and resolved in the United States.

Woodward-Burns is an Assistant Professor at Howard University.

Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic.

Hamilton: An American Musical made its record-breaking Broadway debut in 2015—but the musical has reached far beyond typical Broadway audiences to pave a path into political discourse, pop culture, classroom curriculums, and the broader conversation about contemporary American politics. What led to this chain reaction of popularity, and how does it continue to influence these cultural and political dynamics? Jeffery and Sara Mehltretter Drury work to answer these questions using the tools of rhetorical criticism by bringing together a collection of essays in their book, Rhetoric, Politics, and Hamilton: an American Musical (Peter Lang, 2021). This volume is part of the Frontiers in Political Communication series at Peter Lang Publishers—a book series that aims to produce timely scholarship at the very cutting edge of political communication, emphasizing “how citizens, governments, and the media interact is the communication process.” Dr. Sara Mehltretter Drury is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, and the Director of Democracy & Public Discourse at Wabash College. Dr. Jeffery Mehltretter Drury is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Wabash College. Their combined expertise has helped to produce an edited volume that invites the reader to join the deep analysis of the musical Hamilton.

The book is structured around three major themes in the realm of rhetorical criticism: public memory, rhetoric and social identity, rhetoric of democracy and social change. Each section of the book presents multiple interpretations of the musical in order to present new perspectives in understanding Hamilton’s relevance to politics and culture. Public memory centers on the narrative concepts of Hamilton and how it addresses American myths regarding the American Dream and the foundation of America. Rhetoric and Social Identity approaches race and gender within Hamilton, including the juxtaposition of portraying the nation’s white founders as people of color on stage. This section examines the musical’s accessibility to communities across America to discuss both historical and modern-day political conflicts. Rhetoric of Democracy and Social Change evaluates Hamilton’s influence in contemporary politics in how it normalizes political debate by humanizing historical political figures. By utilizing academic theories and analyzing multifaceted aspects of the musical, Rhetoric, Politics, and Hamilton: An American Musical welcomes a variety of arguments to encourage its readers to engage in the ideas, arguments, and representation of American history in a contemporary context.

Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U. S. Territorial Expansion (Cornell UP, 2020) explains why the United States stopped annexing territory by focusing on annexation's domestic consequences, both political and normative. It describes how the U.S. rejection of further annexations, despite its rising power, set the stage for twentieth-century efforts to outlaw conquest. In contrast to conventional accounts of a nineteenth-century shift from territorial expansion to commercial expansion, Richard W. Maass argues that U.S. ambitions were selective from the start.

By presenting twenty-three case studies, Maass examines the decision-making of U.S. leaders facing opportunities to pursue annexation between 1775 and 1898. U.S. presidents, secretaries, and congressmen consistently worried about how absorbing new territories would affect their domestic political influence and their goals for their country. These leaders were particularly sensitive to annexation's domestic costs where xenophobia interacted with their commitment to democracy: rather than grant political representation to a large alien population or subject it to a long-term imperial regime, they regularly avoided both of these perceived bad options by rejecting annexation. As a result, U.S. leaders often declined even profitable opportunities for territorial expansion, and they renounced the practice entirely once no desirable targets remained.

In addition to offering an updated history of the foundations of U.S. territorial expansion, The Picky Eagle adds important nuance to previous theories of great-power expansion, with implications for our understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international relations.

Grant Golub is a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II.

Today’s Postscript (a special series that allows scholars to comment on pressing contemporary issues) engages the latest chapter in American abortion politics as the United States Supreme Court has just allowed a Texas statute banning abortions after 6 weeks to go into effect. Lilly Goren and Susan Liebell have assembled a panel of experts in political science and law to interrogate the construction of the Texas law, the Supreme Court ruling, and how these cases map onto the wider political landscape.

Dr. Renée Ann Cramer is a Professor of Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University -- and the author of Birthing a Movement: Midwives, Law, and the Politics of Reproductive Care from Stanford University Press, 2021.

Dr. Rebecca Kreitzer is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- and the author of some of the most downloaded articles in political science on the abortion policy environment such as “Anti-Abortion Policymaking and Women’s Representation” (co-authored with Reingold, Beth, Tracy L. Osborn, and Michele Swers) in Political Research Quarterly. See her Monkey Cage piece on SB-8 from last week.

Dr. Andrew R. Lewis is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati and the author of The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars (Cambridge, 2017). He writes at the intersection of politics, religion, and law in America with expertise in Evangelicals and politics, conservative legal activism, and rights politics.

Dr. Joshua C. Wilson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver -- and the . author of The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, & America’s Culture Wars and The New States of Abortion Politics both from Stanford University Press 2013 and 2016. His article “Striving to Rollback or Protect Roe: State Legislation and the Trump-Era Politics of Abortion appeared in Publius last summer.

Dr. Mary Ziegler is a Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at Florida State University College of Law. She is the author of Abortion and the Law in America: A Legal History, Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and has a forthcoming book Dollars for Life: The Antiabortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment expected from Yale University Press, 2022).

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI.

Public disenchantment with and distrust of American government is at an all-time high and who can blame them?

In the face of widespread challenges--everything from record levels of personal and national debt and the sky high cost of education, to gun violence, racial discrimination, an immigration crisis, overpriced pharmaceuticals, and much more--the government seems paralyzed and unable to act, the most recent example being Covid-19. It's the deadliest pandemic in over a century. In addition to an unimaginable sick and death toll, it has left more than thirty million Americans unemployed. Despite this, Washington let the first round of supplemental unemployment benefits run out and for more than a month were unable to agree on a bill to help those suffering.

Jeanne Sheehan's book American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government (Palgrave Macmillian, 2021) explains why we are in this situation, why the government is unable to respond to key challenges, and what we can do to right the ship. It requires that readers "upstream," stop blaming the individuals in office and instead look at the root cause of the problem. The real culprit is the system; it was designed to protect liberty and structured accordingly. As a result, however, it has left us with a government that is not responsive, largely unaccountable, and often ineffective. This is not an accident; it is by design. Changing the way our government operates requires rethinking its primary goal(s) and then restructuring to meet them.

To this end, this book offers specific reform proposals to restructure the government and in the process make it more accountable, effective, and responsive.

Jeanne Sheehan is a Carol S. Russett Award winning Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iona College School of Arts & Science. She is also Bloomberg News Political Contributor and the author of several books and articles

Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades.

Gender, and regulations of and discourses on it, have historically been a cornerstone of the conservative Christian belief system. The stance of the Catholic Church on feminism, for instance, has often been criticized for being reductive and exclusionary. As Christianity has exerted a profound influence on the government and principles of the United States from the time of its founding, in this modern age, it is natural to examine the extent of its influence on LGBTQ-related, and particularly trans-related legislation.

In the fourth episode of our themed series Across the Rainbow, Dr. SJ Crasnow, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, and author of the article “The Legacy of ‘Gender Ideology.” Dr. Crasnow talks to us about the current state of anti-trans legislation in the U.S., and the role played by conservative Christianity in shaping it.

Herbert “Bert” Kritzer, the Marvin J. Sonosky Chair of Law and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota Law School, has a new book that explores the process for reform of judicial selection across the fifty states. This is a fascinating examination of the different approaches that state legislatures, governors, partisans, and citizens have pursued in reforming the process, within each state, of judicial selection at all levels. With a brief historical overview of how this process was initially pursued in the early days of the republic, Kritzer moves to the central time period of the book, which is examining the state systems that were in place in the mid-20th century and the moves across the country to modernize court systems and how those moves unfolded. The main period that Kritzer focuses on is between 1980 and 2020, and he carefully reviews the reform efforts that succeeded as well as those that failed

Judicial Selection in the States: Politics and the Struggle for Reform (Cambridge UP, 2020) examines the legal and democratic subcultures as a way to frame and understand the reasons behind the move towards reforms. But the heart of the book is diving into various states to see what they tried to change, who tried to change it, and if they were at all successful in these reform efforts. One of the more popular plans for state-level judicial selection is the “Missouri Plan”, which was designed to improve the quality of judges by establishing a kind of review board/nominating commission that made recommendations to the governor of the state. Many states, between 1960 and 1980, moved towards adopting the Missouri plan as the method for judicial selection. But following this, states continued to reform with an eye towards more legal professionalism as the guiding tenet behind judicial selection. According to Kritzer’s research, this was very much the case between 1980 and 1999, and this was in concert with the overhauling of state constitutions as well. Around 2000 there is a bit of a shift, as partisan politics now starts to be more of the driver behind the moves to reform or change the selection of state judges. Judicial Selection in the States is an interesting exploration of the various forms of judicial selection, the moves towards reform over the decades, the shifting role of partisanship as well as the impetus towards more professional and merit-based outcomes.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader crusaded against what they saw as a misguided and often corrupt government. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens’ movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. Citizen advocates disrupted government plans for urban highways and new hydroelectric dams and got Congress to pass tough legislation to protect clean air and clean water. They helped lead a revolution in safety that forced companies and governments to better protect consumers and workers from dangerous products and hazardous work conditions.

And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism—the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II. Public interest advocates exposed that alliance’s secret bargains and unintended consequences. They showed how government power often was used to advance private interests rather than restrain them. In the process of attacking government for its failings and its dangers, the public interest movement struggled to replace traditional liberalism with a new approach to governing. The citizen critique of government power instead helped clear the way for their antagonists: Reagan-era conservatives seeking to slash regulations and enrich corporations.

Paul Sabin's book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Norton, 2021) traces the history of the public interest movement and explores its tangled legacy, showing the ways in which American liberalism has been at war with itself. The book forces us to reckon with the challenges of regaining our faith in government’s ability to advance the common good.

Paul Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. He is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future and Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Twitter. Website.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website