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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.

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.

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.

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 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.

While the Civil Rights Movement brought increasing opportunities for blacks, this period also saw the liberalization of American immigration policy. The same agitation that allowed blacks to vote also made it possible for increasing numbers of non-European immigrants to enter America for the first time. What has an expanded immigration regime meant for how blacks express national attachment? Using quantitative and qualitative data, this book helps us understand the context and constraint of white supremacy on the formation of black public opinion and national attachment. Recent waves of immigration have presented a dilemma for blacks, causing them to reflect yet again on the meaning and depth of their own citizenship, national identity, and sense of belonging in the United States. It is the author’s contention that immigration, both historically and in the contemporary moment, has served as a reminder of the limited inclusion of African Americans in the body politic.

Some of the most remarkable impacts of digital media on political activism lie not in the new types of speech it provides to disorganized masses, but in the new types of listening it fosters among organized pressure groups. Beneath the easily visible waves of e-petitions, “likes,” hashtags, and viral videos lie a powerful undercurrent of activated public opinion. In this book, David Karpf offers a rich, detailed assessment of how political organizations carefully monitor this online activity and use it to develop new tactics and strategies that help them succeed in the evolving hybrid media system. Karpf discusses the power and potential of this new “analytic activism,” exploring the organizational logics and media logics that determine how digital inputs shape the choices that political campaigners make. He provides the first careful analysis of how organizations like Change.org and Upworthy.com influence the types of political narratives that dominate our Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter timelines. He investigates how MoveOn.org and its “netroots” peers use analytics to listen more effectively to their members and supporters. He also identifies two boundaries of analytic activism—the analytics floor and analytics frontier—which define the scope of this new style of organized citizen engagement. The book concludes by examining the limitations of analytic activism, raising a cautionary flag about the ways that putting too much faith in digital listening can lead to a weakening of civil society as a whole.

Why has it been so long since an American president has effectively and consistently presented well-crafted, intellectually substantive arguments to the American public? Why have presidential utterances fallen from the rousing speeches of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR to a series of robotic repetitions of talking points and 60-second soundbites, largely designed to obfuscate rather than illuminate? This book draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents' ability to communicate with the public. The book argues that the ever-increasing pressure for presidents to manage public opinion and perception has created a “pathology of vacuous rhetoric and imagery” where gesture and appearance matter more than accomplishment and fact. The book tracks the campaign to simplify presidential discourse through presidential and speechwriting decisions made from the Truman to the present administration, explaining how and why presidents have embraced anti-intellectualism and vague platitudes as a public relations strategy. The book sees this anti-intellectual stance as a deliberate choice rather than a reflection of presidents' intellectual limitations. Only the smart, it suggests, know how to dumb down. The result, it shows, is a dangerous debasement of our political discourse and a quality of rhetoric which has been described, charitably, as “a linguistic struggle” and, perhaps more accurately, as “dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.”

Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt traces the way American journalists have made use of quantitative information in their news reporting from the early twentieth century to the present day. In so doing, it examines changing notions of journalistic objectivity and truth telling, particularly as these have evolved alongside social science disciplines such as political science and sociology. Apostles of Certainty uses methodological techniques pioneered in science and technology studies to link the study of newsroom ontologies and epistemologies to a broader analysis of how public knowledge is produced and distributed in the digital age. Though largely historical, the book also sheds light on politics and media in the twenty-first century, with findings that speak to current public conversations around so-called post-truth and the spread of fake news. The book concludes that, viewed over the long term, journalistic reporting in the United States has improved in its accuracy, subtlety, and professional self-certainty, but we have not witnessed a simultaneous improvement in the conduct of US political discourse. In part this is because political journalism only influences politics to a limited degree. To the degree it does have an impact on the political process, the book argues that data-oriented journalism plays a largely tribal and aesthetic role and divides Americans into empirical “tribes” based in part on the perceived elitism of data-based reporting.

The sanctity of political speech is a key element of the U.S. Constitution and a cornerstone of the American republic. When the Supreme Court linked political speech to campaign finance in its landmark Buckley v. Valeo (1976) decision, the modern era of campaign finance regulation was born. In practical terms, this decision meant that in order to pass constitutional muster, any laws limiting money in politics must be narrowly tailored and serve a compelling state interest. The lone state interest the Court was willing to entertain was the mitigation of corruption. In order to reach this argument the Court advanced a sophisticated behavioral model, one with key assumptions about how laws will affect voters’ opinions and behavior. These assumptions have received surprisingly little attention in the literature. This book takes up the task of identifying and analyzing empirically the Court’s presumed links between campaign finance regulations and political opinions and behavior. In so doing, we rely on original survey data and experiments from 2009–2016 to openly confront the question of what happens when the Supreme Court is wrong, and when the foundation of over forty years of jurisprudence is simply not true.

This book presents a new view of American policymaking, focusing on networks of actors responsible for policymaking. Policy change is not easily predictable from election results or public opinion because compromise and coalitions among individual actors make a difference in all three branches of government. The amount of government action, the issue content of policy changes, and the ideological direction of policy all depend on the joint actions of executive officials, legislators, and interest group leaders. The patterns of cooperation among policymakers and activists make each issue area and time period different from the others and undermine attempts to build an unchanging unified model of American policymaking. The project relies on a content analysis of 268 books and articles on the history of 14 different major policy areas over 60 years. The histories collectively uncover the 790 most significant policy enactments of the federal government and credit 1,306 specific actors for their role in policy change, along with more than 60 circumstantial factors. The book compiles and integrates these findings to assess the factors that drive policymaking.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of social groups that act as discrete voting blocs for candidates, constituencies for group leaders, and demanders of particular policy commitments. Since the 1960s, the evolution in the relative internal influence of Democratic Party constituencies has reduced the size of the party’s conservative wing and expanded its policy agenda—but no organized liberal movement has emerged to dominate its internal organization or succeed in shifting its policies toward leftist positions. The Republican Party, in contrast, serves as the vehicle of a conservative ideological movement that has succeeded in fusing its intellectual strands, marketing its broad critiques of government, building a supportive organizational network, and moving the party toward the policy commitments of its right wing. This underlying party asymmetry produces distinct Democratic and Republican approaches to debating public issues, campaigning for votes, and pursuing policy change in government. The concurrent operational liberalism and symbolic conservatism of the American public allows each party to maintain its unique character while effectively competing for broader popular support.

Curing systemic inequalities in the criminal justice system is the unfinished business of the Civil Rights movement. No part of that system highlights this truth more than the current implementation of the death penalty. The findings of this research demonstrate that the racial inequity in the meting out of death sentences has legal and political externalities that move beyond individual defendants to larger numbers of African Americans. This book looks at the meaning of the death penalty to and for African Americans. Using various sites of analysis, the book shows the connection between criminal justice policies like the death penalty and the political and legal rights of African Americans who are tangentially connected to the criminal justice system through familial and social networks. Drawing on Black politics, legal and political theory, the book utilizes a mixed-method approach that incorporates analysis of media reports, capital jury selection and survey data, and original focus group data. As the rates of incarceration trend upward, Black politics scholars have focused on the impact of incarceration on the voting strength of the Black community. Local, and even regional, narratives of African American politics and the death penalty expose the fractures in American democracy that foment perceptions of exclusion among Blacks.

Over the past few decades, a fundamental shift in political campaign strategy has been afoot in U.S. elections: Political campaigns have been gradually shifting their attention away from swing voters toward their respective, partisan bases. Independents and weak partisans have been targeted with less frequency, and the emphasis in contemporary elections has been on strong partisans. This book documents this shift—away from persuasion toward base mobilization—in the context of U.S. presidential elections and explains that this phenomenon is likely linked to several developments, including advances in campaign technology and voter-targeting capabilities as well as insights from behavioral social science focusing on voter mobilization. The analyses show the 2000 presidential election represents a watershed cycle that punctuated this shift. The book also explores the implications of the shift toward base mobilization and links these developments to growing turnout rates for strong partisans and attenuating participation among independents or swing voters over time. The book concludes these patterns have contributed to heightened partisan polarization in the United States.

Scholars and pundits have come to expect backlash to civil rights battles, especially when courts are involved. From white backlash to Roe rage, American history is replete with stories of unpopular minorities attempting to secure rights and opponents rising up to impede them. Yet there are instances when minority rights efforts escape the opposition politics so familiar in US civil rights policy debates. Backlash, while a specter in many contentious political battles, is neither inevitable nor invulnerable. One key factor, this book argues, is visibility. Drawing from interviews with advocates and opponents, the book introduces readers to two sets of civil rights battles in which advocates devised strategies to remain “under the radar” and away from the prying eyes of a volatile public. In so doing they diminished both the incidence and influence of backlash. Advocates working on behalf of lesbian and gay parents relied on lower court rulings, family law, and less polarizing frames to advance custody and co-parenting requests without attracting the attention of the “family values” groups and voters who had swiftly barred marriage equality. Those working on behalf of individuals with disabilities hoping to live in community-based group housing delayed notifying zoning boards and neighbors of their intention to reside in single-family neighborhoods until after their property was secured in order to minimize NIMBY-induced housing impediments. This study of low-visibility advocacy offers a lens on an underexplored and underestimated source of policy reform.

Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream explores the political significance of ethnicity for new immigrant and native-born blacks. Utilizing an original survey of a New York City labor population and multiple national data sources, Black Ethnics concludes that racial and ethnic identities affect the ways in which black ethnic groups conceptualize their possibilities for advancement and placement within the American polity. The ethnic and racial dual identity for blacks leads to significant distinctions in political behavior, feelings of incorporation, and policy choices in ways not previously theorized. The steady immigration of black populations from Africa and the Caribbean over the past few decades has fundamentally changed the racial, ethnic, and political landscape in the United States. An important question for social scientists is how these “new” blacks will behave politically. With increases in immigration of black ethnic populations in the United States, the political, social, and economic integration processes of black immigrants does not completely echo that of native-born American blacks. The emergent complexity of black intraracial identity and negotiations within the American polity raise new questions about black political incorporation, assimilation, acceptance, and fulfillment of the American Dream. By comparing Afro-Caribbean and African groups to native-born blacks, this book develops a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the “new black America” coalition politics in the twenty-first century.

Black Natural Law offers a new way of understanding the African American political tradition. By telling the stories of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr., the book shows how appeals to a higher law, or God’s law, have long fueled black political engagement. Such appeals do not seek to implement divine directives on earth; rather, they pose a challenge to the wisdom of the world, and they mobilize communities for collective action. Black natural law is deeply democratic: While charismatic leaders may provide the occasion for reflection and mobilization, all are capable of discerning the higher law using human capacities for reason and emotion. At a time when continuing racial injustice poses a deep moral challenge, the most powerful intellectual resources in the struggle for justice have been abandoned. Black Natural Law recovers a rich tradition, and it examines just how this tradition was forgotten. A black intellectual class emerged that was disconnected from social movement organizing and beholden to white interests. Appeals to higher law became politically impotent: overly rational or overly sentimental. Recovering the black natural law tradition provides a powerful resource for confronting police violence, mass incarceration, and today’s gross racial inequities. Black Natural Law offers a new way to approach natural law, a topic central to the Western ethical and political tradition. While drawing particularly on African American resources, Black Natural Law speaks to all who seek politics animated by justice.