Justin S. Vaughn and Jose D. Villalobos have written Czars in the White House: The Rise of Policy Czars as Presidential Management Tools (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Vaughn is Associate Professor of Political Science at Boise State University; Villalobos is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Who will best carry out the policy goals of the President? Appointed officials or White House advisors? Vaughn and Villalobos track 40 years of Presidents deciding that advisors – czars – can best oversee drug policy, AIDS policy, and energy policy. They find considerable variation in how effectively each president’s czars have served in the role, ranging from powerful individuals, such as Richard Nixon’s energy czar, William Simon, to largely ineffective ones, such as Adolfo Carrion, President Obama’s urban policy czar.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s ability to select one’s own path in life – to choose one’s occupation, one’s values, one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only self-knowledge, but autonomy and personality. Yet we now know that the image of the individual chooser that Mill’s view seems to presuppose is not quite accurate. It is not only the case that environmental factors of various kinds exert a great but often invisible influence over our choices; we must also contend with the limits of our cognitive resources. Sometimes, having to choose can be a burden, a hazard, and even an obstacle to liberty.

In Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice (Oxford University Press, 2015), Cass Sunstein examines the varied phenomena of choice-making. Bringing a range of finding from behavioral sciences, Sunstein makes the case that sometimes avoiding or delegating choice is an exercise of individual freedom.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thomas Holyoke is the author of The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry (Georgetown UP, 2015). Holyoke is associate professor of political science at California State University, Fresno.

Can one of the most reviled professions in the country be expected to act ethically? If so, what would an ethical lobbyist look like? The answer is a guarded “maybe.” Holyoke sets out to explore how Washington’s influence industry can be reformed. In addition to a provocative challenge to the status quo, Holyoke provided an informed overview of the history of lobbying in Washington, and how the current system of influence works.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are the multiple meanings, ambivalences, possible risks, and potentials for transformation that arise from interrogating empathy on a transnational scale? Carolyn Pedwell (University of Kent) thinks through these complex questions in her new book, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The book ambitiously traverses multiple disciplinary and intellectual boundaries, drawing together feminist and anti-racist social theory, media and cultural studies, international development texts and practices, scientific studies of empathy, the political rhetoric of Barack Obama, business books on empathy, and more. In doing so, Pedwell queries empathy as a social and political relation that cannot be separated from power, conflict, oppression, and inequality. This book explores the ways that empathy is a contested term employed transnationally in various ways and on behalf of various political and social interests, traces the ways that empathy might be translated and felt differently.

Zachariah Mampilly is the author along with Adam Branch of Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change (Zed Press, 2015). Mampilly is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Africana Studies at Vassar College; Branch is assistant professor of political science at San Diego State University and a senior research fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, in Kampala, Uganda.

Much of the Arab Spring took place in Africa, but little commentary connected those protests to the continent. In Africa Uprising, Mampilly and Branch unearth the connections between contemporary political protests in Africa and the long history of protest in various African countries. Building on the theoretical debates between Kwame Nkrumah and Franz Fanon, Africa Uprising uses cases studies from Nigeria, Uganda, and Ethiopia to explain how the third wave of African protests have unfolded.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leah Wright Rigueur is an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her book The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton University Press, 2015) examines how the Grand Old Party of Lincoln lost its position as the home of the African American vote. Covering more than four decades beginning in Roosevelt’s New Deal to Ronald Reagan’s presidential election, Rigueur examines the ideas and actions of black Republican activists, officials, and politicians to build and remain within the Party’s shrinking tent. Marginalized within their own communities and party, black Republicans fought political battles on two fronts. They continually sought to include black needs and interest in the changing formulation of conservatism. Their stories reveal an alternative approach to economic and civil rights within a party increasingly hostile to racially progressive ideas as it wooed the white vote. Rigueur introduces us to republican views of many including the Senator Edward Brooks, Robert J. Brown, Jackie Robinson and black organizations such as National Black Republican Council and the National Negro Republican Assembly. Black republicans dealt with numerous issues including ensuring black political participation, individual rights, economic opportunity, and racial equality. Rigueur has given us a thought-provoking examination on the failure of the Republican Party to live up the legacy of Lincoln, and to respond to its black members who remained committed to the conservative ideals of free enterprise, individual initiative, and limited government.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With over a dozen Republican candidates in the summer news, what will it take for one to emerge from the pack? Kristen Soltis Anderson‘s new book, The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up) (Broadside Books, 2015), has an answer. Anderson is the co-founder of Echelon Insights, a public opinion and data analytics firm that helps campaigns and companies design their messages and strategies. Anderson’s book draws on this experience as a campaign and polling expert to suggest that Republicans need to understand the changing values and behaviors of Millennials. She argues that successful candidates will move digital to the center of their campaigns and reach out to younger voters in new ways. Failing to do so, Anderson predicts, will lead to generations of new voters turned off to the GOP.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professor James Gelvin joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the Arab Uprisings, democratization in the Middle-East and Northern Africa, ISIS, al-Qaeda, terrorism, and America’s role imposing neo-liberal economic policies in the Middle East that have strongly shaped the political economy of the region. James Gelvin is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is the revised and updated edition of The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2012). If you want to be informed about what’s going on in the Middle East today, this short, easy-to-read book is the best work out there. For more information on James Gelvin, you can click here to visit his UCLA website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David George Surdham is the author of The Big Leagues Go to Washington: Congress and Sports Antitrust, 1951-1989 (University of Illinois Press, 2015). Surdham is Associate Professor of Economics at Northern Iowa University.

Just back from the Major League Baseball All-Star break, Surdham has written a book for sports lovers. Why do major league sports receive such preferential treatment from Congress? And what does this have to do with labor and economic development policy? Surdham examines Congressional hearings held over decades to figure out how Washington’s role in professional sports has changed over since the 1950s.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can a practical philosophical perspective concerned with justice and fairness help us address the problem of climate change? Henry Shue (Merton College, Oxford) tackles this essential question in his book Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford UP, 2014). The book collects twenty-five years of Shue’s innovative work on climate justice into one rich and comprehensive volume. This conversation discusses the relation between climate justice and international inequality, justice between generations, alternative energy, how the science of climate change can inform philosophy, and more. The book is sure to be important for philosophers, scholars of human rights and international ethics, environmental studies and political theory, international institutions and global politics scholars, and other fields.