Modern democracy is build around a collection of moral and political commitments.  Among the most familiar and central of these concern voting.  It is commonly held that legitimate government requires a system of universal suffrage. Yet, democrats tend to hold that certain exclusions are permissible.  For example, it is commonly thought that children and the mentally impaired may justifiably be disenfranchised.   We also tend to think that the disenfranchisement of felons and non-citizen residents is permissible.  Indeed, these exclusion are often thought to be consistent with universal suffrage.

In Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Exclusions (Oxford University Press, 2014), Claudio Lopez-Guerra challenges our common understanding of voting.  Ultimately, he argues in favor of an elitist system of enfranchisement by lottery.  He also criticizes arguments that universal suffrage is consistent with the exclusion of children, the mentally impaired, felons, and resident non-citizens.  The result is a fascinating and provocative exploration of, and challenge to, the fundamental idea that voting is a basic right.

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Matthew T. Corrigan is the author of Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush Remade Florida (University Press of Florida, 2014). Corrigan is chair and professor of political science at the University of North Florida.

With an election just 700 odd days away, it is not too early to start talking about the candidates. Corrigan takes up this challenge with his examination of the political and policy legacy of former-Florida Governor Jeb Bush. He describes Bush as a “culture warrior” who completely changed Florida politics. Bush ushered in a host of policy reforms, particularly on education, that are likely to animate a presidential campaign, if he chooses to run.

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Janet K. Shim‘s new book juxtaposes the accounts of epidemiologists and lay people to consider the roles of race, class, and gender (among other things) in health and illness. Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease (New York University Press, 2014) integrates several kinds of sources into a theoretically-informed sociological investigation of inequality and cardiovascular disease, including interviews with epidemiologists and people of color who are dealing in different ways with the disease, participant observation at conferences and health education events, and engagement with discourses of cultural and social theory. Shim considers the points of commonality and divergence among lay and epidemiological communities in terms of how each group conceptualizes the nature of social and cultural difference, the significance of difference for health and disease, and the reliability of different forms of knowledge. In the process, Heart-Sick places these accounts into dialogue with theories of biopower and biopolitics, intersectionality (a notion that addresses how “interlocking systems of oppression shape both the distribution of chances and of risk”), and fundamental causality (a concept that considers social conditions as fundamental causes of disease). The result is a masterfully articulated and clearly argued study that will be of interest to sociologists of science and medicine, historians, and curious readers interested in becoming better informed about the processes through which we have come to understand our bodies and selves and the consequences of those processes for research and treatment of heart disease.

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Loraine Kennedy‘s The Politics of Economic Restructuring in India: Economic Governance and State Spatial Rescaling (Routledge, 2014) is a timely and important intervention into the debate on how economic liberalisation is transforming the Indian state. The book’s central argument is that these reforms have ‘rescaled’ the Indian state, with important consequences for growth and economic governance. This is perused through analyses of state strategies, Special Economic Zones and urban development, amongst others.

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Candis Watts Smith is the author of Black Mosaic: The Politics of Black Pan-Ethnic Diversity (NYU Press, 2014). Watts Smith is assistant professor of political science at Williams College.

How do Black immigrants in the US view their racial and ethnic identities? Do they identify with being Black, African American, or something else? Like Christina Greer (Black Ethnics) and Natalie-Masuoka and Jane Junn (Politics of Belonging) who have appeared on the podcast before, Watts Smith aims to unpack the immigrant experience in the US. Her book takes terms like African American and Black, and analyzes the way individuals from a variety of immigrant backgrounds attach identity. Watts Smith finds areas of wide agreement on group consciousness, but also areas of divergence, particularly around finding a common policy agenda.

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Few books on Southeast Asia cover as much geographic, historical and theoretical ground as Dan Slater’s Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Working across seven case studies, the book argues that existing theories of institutionalization don’t account for regional variation in regime type. Tracing causal processes from the colonial period to the present day, it shows how internal conflicts occurring at critical moments of state building encouraged the formation of elite “protection pacts” with a high degree of durability. Along the way, it engages with an expansive and diverse array of literature on Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Burma, Singapore, South Vietnam, and Thailand.

Ordering Power is an ambitious and demanding study, but also a highly accessible one that appeals to a range of audiences. Above all, it is a book that demands the attention of anyone interested in Southeast Asian politics. As John Sidel puts it, “Slater has single-handedly raised the standards–and the stakes–of cross-national comparative analysis” of the region.

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Mike O’Connor is the author of A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism (University Press of Kansas 2014). He has also published articles in Contemporary Pragmatism and The Sixties. O’Connor teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and holds a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He was one of the original bloggers at the U.S. Intellectual History website, and served as a founding officer of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

O’Connor offers an intellectual history of the relationship between government and business in the US. Starting at the very earliest days of the republic and travelling up to the contemporary time period, the book offers rich details and interesting findings about the nature of government. I was most interested in the exploration of the opposition to taxes. The book is a nice complement to previous podcasts from Daniel Stedman-Jones in May 2013.

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Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-11 attacks in New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, to the ill-equipped and ill-fated responses to disasters like the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, and Hurricane Katrina, a common denominator in all of these events, and those similar, was a lack of inter- and intra-government information sharing. In his new book Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange (MIT 2014), Alon Peled, associate professor of political science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, conceptualizes a platform that would incentivize inter-agency information sharing. Called the Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE), the platform would not only enable the trading of information, but also offers the valuation of information assets. In this way the PSIE creates an inter-government economic system. In detailing of the opportunities and threats to such a system, Peled offers examples of how similar systems have been implemented in governments throughout the world, and uses interdisciplinary training and experience in information technology and political science to describe a system and rationale that could offer assistance to those looking for simplified and efficient government.

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Kirsten Weld‘s book Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2014) tells the story of the 2005 discovery of a vast police archive in Guatemala. Officials had long denied that it existed, and for good reason, because it documented years of kidnapping and murder under the auspices of counterinsurgency. Weld’s book accounts for the repercussions of that discovery on many levels. It is at once an ethnography of human rights activists turned archivists, an argument about the centrality of the production of knowledge with regards to both repression and human rights work, and a gripping account of the debates and politics of Guatemala’s reckoning with the legacies of its Dirty war.

As campaign season ends, what can we make of all those ads? Brian Arbour is the author of Candidate-Centered Campaigns: Political Messages, Winning Personalities, and Personal Appeals (Palgrave-MacMillan 2014). Arbour is assistant professor of political science at John Jay College, City University of New York.

Why do certain candidates focus on making campaign promises and extolling their legislative record, while others just talk about themselves? Arbour argues that scholars have underplayed the personal narratives that feature so prominently in much campaign advertising. As a result, candidate-centered appeals for votes have been largely ignored or misunderstood. Arbour aims to address this deficit with his new book that examines the way candidates talk about their own background and the background of opponents. He argues that candidate-centered campaigns build trust with voters as one would with neighbors or new co-workers.

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