Richard L. Hasen has written Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections (Yale University Press, 2016). Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine.

In the midst of the most expensive presidential contest in U.S. history, is money buying access and influence? Are super PACs corrupting the democratic process? Or are eager supporter simply exercising their First Amendment rights? In Plutocrats United, Hasen argues that these may be the wrong questions and the long-standing debate between corruption and free speech – so long a part of constitutional discussions of the issues – is in need of an overhaul. Instead, he suggests that a renewed focus on political equality could reshape the way the country and the Supreme Court considered the role of money in politics. Hasen makes specific policy recommendations for what a new campaign finance regime might look like, and why this new approach would advance the democracy as well as the principle of political equality.

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Shana Kushner Gadarian and Bethany Albertson are the authors of Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World (Cambridge UP, 2015). Gadarian is assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University; Albertson is assistant professor of government at the University of Texas, Austin.

Anxious Politics explores the emotional side of politics. Albertson and Gadarian argue that political anxiety triggers politics engagement in ways that are potentially both promising and harmful for democracy. Using public health, immigration, terrorism, and climate change, the book demonstrates that anxiety affects how we consume political news, who we trust, and what politics we support. Anxiety about politics triggers coping strategies in the political world, where these strategies are often shaped by partisan agendas.

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Samuel Moyn is Professor of Law and History at Harvard University. In Christian Human Rights University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), Moyn provides a historical intervention in our understanding of how the idea of human rights in the mid-twentieth century came to be. He argues that contrary to current thought, that sees it as part of the long-legacy of Christianity, or the triumph of liberal democracy, it has a more complicated history. The notion of human rights was inspired by a defense of the dignity of the human person. It first arose just prior to WW II as part of the reformulation of the liberal idea of human rights, deemed morally bankrupt, taken up by conservative religious thinkers. Moyn argues that the long-held Christian concept of moral equality of human beings did not translate into political rights. Rather the reformulation of human rights in the 1940s was a Catholic communitarian defense against totalitarian, capitalism and political secularism. The language of rights was extricated from the legacy of the French Revolution “rights of man” to become a religious value checking the political power of the state with religious freedom as a key concept. The philosophy of “personalism” articulated by Jacques Maritain recast democracy and human rights in a Catholic vein becoming enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the ascendancy of Christian democratic parties at mid-century. Secularized after the 1960s, human rights became an increasingly uninspiring concept unable to do the work it promised. Moyn suggests transcending this mid-twentieth Christian legacy and notes the need to find a new effective transformative creed.

In Rethinking the Chicano Movement (Routledge, 2015), Marc Simon Rodriguez surveys some of the most recent scholarship on the Chicana/o Civil Rights Movement, situating the struggle within the broader context of the 1960s and 1970s, and assessing its ethos and legacy. Illustrating the movement’s national scope, Dr. Rodriguez highlights: electoral activism in Crystal City Texas, the Farmworker Movement in the California’s San Joaquin Valley, community and educational reform efforts in Denver and Los Angeles, and the rise of Chicano media and arts throughout urban and rural communities across the country. Whereas previous generations of scholars sought to distance the Chicana/o mobilizations from the Mexican Americanist movement of the 30s, 40s, 50s, and early 60s, Rodriguez correctly asserts that El Movimiento blended practical reformist goals with a militant ethos. Youthful in character, determined to establish community control, and impatient for change, Rodriguez concludes that The Movement’s ultimate legacy was indeed profound as it established “the infrastructure to accommodate the Latino demographic revolution of the late twentieth century.”

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Adam Sheingate has written Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Sheingate is associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.

Who is spending all this money – multiple billions in 2016 – on politics? Consultants, of course, and they’ve been at it for decades. In Building a Business of Politics, Sheingate walks through a century of political history, explaining how the rise of polling and business marketing influenced the nature of campaigns and policy advocacy. The book’s central argument is about the way politics has been reshaped by business and how the business of politics has changed the way we think about policy.

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Deepa Iyer is the author of We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future (The New Press, 2015). Iyer is Senior Fellow at Center for Social Inclusion and was Executive Director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) for a decade prior.

Drawing on professional experiences in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and years leading a national advocacy organization, Iyer weaves personal anecdotes, excellent elite interviews, and policy recommendations into We Too Sing America. She calls out the organized anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political movement in the country and calls for mobilized political action by South Asians to resist these threats. Scholars and policy practitioners interested in immigrant rights will enjoy this new book.

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How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale Jamieson (Environmental Studies and Philosophy, NYU) grapples with these questions. The book is a pragmatic philosophical exploration of climate change and the human response to it at the same time that it provides a clear scientific, conceptual, and economic history of the issues involved. Ultimately, the book asks how to “live in productive relationship with the dynamic systems that govern a changing planet” (180). Our conversation covers the obstacles to action on climate change, competing economic approaches to addressing climate change, the needed ethical and moral resources, a reflection on the 2015 Paris talks, and more.

Christopher Faricy has written Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Faricy is an assistant professor of political science and public policy at The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Conventional wisdom says that Democrats fight to expand spending on social policy, while Republicans push to lower taxes. In Welfare for the Wealthy, we learn that the situation is a bit more complicated than that. By focusing on tax expenditures as a form of social policy, Faricy spotlights the partisan consensus on providing citizens with health, education, and income benefits. The distinction, he argues, is in the mechanism for providing – and who typically from – these benefits.

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Luke Nichter and Douglas Brinkley are the editors of The Nixon Tapes: 1973 (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt 2015). Nichter is associate professor of history at Texas A&M University and Brinkley is professor of history at Rice University.

For students of the Nixon presidency, this book offers a treasure trove of gems. Nichter and Brinkley have followed up on their earlier volume with new transcripts of the taped Oval Office recordings from 1973. Nixon talks with Henry Kissinger, H.R. Halderman, and John Dean. He talks on New Year’s Day with Charles Colson about bombings in Vietnam and with Al Haig about a White House welcome-home celebration attended by Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne.

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This marvelous ethnography traces one of the surprising outcomes of shifting neoliberal regimes in Barbados. As women find themselves leading entrepreneurial lives, they also find themselves engaging in a new range of emotions, both at work and at home. Carla Freeman‘s Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class (Duke University Press, 2014) follows the lives of a number of male and female Barbadians and finds that the demands of the twenty-first century economy create practices of care, attention and intimacy that shape their working lives and their leisure lives, their relationships with families and spouses as well as co-workers, their moments of rest or consumption as well as of business. It’s an important transformation that has reshaped the lives of many Barbadians, and Freeman observes and probes changing landscapes of emotion with a great deal of nuance.

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