New Books in Public Policy

What is the future of work? In What Do We Know and What Should We Do About the Future of Work? (Sage, 2019), Melanie Simms, a Professor of Work and Employment at the University of Glasgow offers an overview off a vast range of issues associated with work- in a short and accessible book. The book asks us to remember the continuities of problems associated with work, as well as the emerging future trends. The latter include automation, an aging population and pensions, emotional and aesthetic labour, skills, universal basic income, and flexible forms of working. By placing these trends in an appropriate historical setting the book offers lessons about how societies can respond, focusing in particular on rights and regulation, enforcement, and the role of unions and collective action. The book will be essential reading for anyone who works! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

World War II played an important role in the trajectory of race and American political development, but the War's effects were much more complex than many assume. In order to unpack these complexities and mine underutilized sources of public opinion data, Steven White had written World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the Presidency, and Civil Rights Advocacy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). White is an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University.White offers an extensive analysis of rarely used survey data and archival evidence to assess white racial attitudes and the White house response to civil rights. Intriguingly, he shows that the white public's racial policy opinions largely DID NOT liberalize during the war against Nazi Germany and Congress remained unwilling to act on a civil rights policy agenda. Painfully aware of this, civil rights advocates shifted venues to lobby for unilateral action by the president. This book offers a reinterpretation of this critical period in American political development, as well as implications for the theoretical relationship between war and the inclusion of marginalized groups in democratic societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Political Theorists Elizabeth F. Cohen and Cyril Ghosh have written a sharp, concise, and complex analysis of the concept of citizenship, the theoretical origins of the term and idea, and they have provided some contemporary examples of the difficulties surrounding issues of citizenship. As part of the Polity Press series “Key Concepts in Political Theory,” Citizenship (Polity, 2019) takes the reader through our own approaches to this concept and begins by highlighting how it is not always or often consistently applied and understood. Cohen and Ghosh examine how our modern conceptions of citizenship, and, by extension, state sovereignty and national borders, developed within the western political theory tradition, including how classical thinkers approached the concept and how these ideas contributed to an understanding of the nation, state, or city itself. They move succinctly through modern political thinkers on citizenship and the state, integrating contemporary thought as well as critiques from more recent and diverse theorists. At the same time, Citizenship explores the concepts and the applications of the concepts to the actual levers of state power and how citizenship works (or, in a variety of contexts, does not work) in practice. This is a thorough-going analysis with many vital and current examples of the difficulties that individuals, and those within certain groups, face in terms of their claims of citizenship. The final chapter delves into the idea and reality of “compromised citizenship” with an outstanding delineation of the different definitions of this status. This chapter also highlights international legal parameters, as well as focusing on specifics cases that provide examples of compromised citizenship. This book is accessible to scholars and interested readers—the authors provide clear examinations of this complex, multi-dimensional idea and policy arena while also analyzing the theory and practice of citizenship as applied in many different contexts.Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A shattering account of the crack cocaine years from award-winning American historian David Farber, Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed (Cambridge University Press, 2019) tells the story of the young men who bet their lives on the rewards of selling 'rock' cocaine, the people who gave themselves over to the crack pipe, and the often-merciless authorities who incarcerated legions of African Americans caught in the crack cocaine underworld. Based on interviews, archival research, judicial records, underground videos, and prison memoirs, Crack explains why, in a de-industrializing America in which market forces ruled and entrepreneurial risk-taking was celebrated, the crack industry was a lucrative enterprise for the 'Horatio Alger boys' of their place and time. These young, predominately African American entrepreneurs were profit-sharing partners in a deviant, criminal form of economic globalization. Hip Hop artists often celebrated their exploits but overwhelmingly, Americans - across racial lines -did not. Crack takes a hard look at the dark side of late twentieth-century capitalism.David Farber is Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Kansas.Matthew Johnson teaches history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith have written an accessible and important book about the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and broader considerations of, essentially, how we got to where we are, in the United States, in regard to race and racism. They also go on to suggest and encourage readers and citizens to move towards a more equal and better future.Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter (NYU Press, 2019) compiles social science research and data to explain the current situation for white citizens, African-American citizens, Latinx citizens, and citizens of other races in the United States. By laying out, in facts and figures, the very different experiences and daily lives of citizens, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith demonstrate not only the way many individuals live profoundly separate and different lives in the United States, but also to show the many ways in which we, as Americans, speak past each other when we are talking about the fraught issue of race, racism, and racial inequality. Stay Woke provides substantial social science data to buttress the discussion and analysis of race and racism in the United States, and it also has an excellent chapter that provides definitions, context, and understanding of so many of the terms that are used, and often differently conceptualized, by citizens in thinking about race, inequality, and social and political dynamics. The authors also examine the history around structural racism and racial inequality. At the end of each chapter Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith also include other resources that contributed to their research and that extends the substance of each chapter—the resources include podcast, films, documentaries, television shows, websites, books and articles. These resources along with the questions provided for discussion and debate help readers and students think about what they are learning from each section of the book. The final part of the book provides more options for activism while positioning these actions within the American federal system. This book can be used in classes across a variety of disciplines; it is also a text that is accessible and of interest to any citizen who might want to learn more and work towards a better future.Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Neoliberalism is one of those fuzzy words that can mean something different to everyone. Wendy Brown is one of the world’s leading scholars on neoliberalism and argue that a generation of neoliberal worldview among political, business, and intellectual leaders led to the populism we’re seeing throughout the world today. But is it mutually exclusive to democracy? Not necessarily. Wendy joins us this week to help make sense of what neoliberalism is, and where things stand today. We were lucky enough to get an advance copy of her book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia UP, 2019), which will be released in July. It’s a follow up to her 2015 book, Undoing the Demos, and you’ll hear her talk about how her thinking has changed since then.Wendy is the Class of 1936 First Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches political theory. You might also recognize her from Astra Taylor’s documentary, What Is Democracy?Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Strange Trips isn’t only the title of Dr. Lucas Richert’s new book; it’s also a good description of the journey substances take from the black market to the doctor’s black bag—and, sometimes, back to the black market again. In Strange Trips: Science, Culture, and the Regulation of Drugs (McGill-Queens UP, 2019), Richert investigates the myths, meanings, and boundaries of recreational drugs, palliative care drugs, and pharmaceuticals, as well as struggles over product innovation, consumer protection, and freedom of choice in the medical marketplace. Focusing primarily on the United States and Canada, Richert shows how perceptions of products can swiftly change, and incorporates analyses of popular culture, science, politics and history to trace the strange trips drugs consistently go on as their uses evolve.Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

n Andrew Sidman, Pork Barrel Politics: How Government Spending Determines Elections in a Polarized Era (Columbia University Press, 2019), offers a systematic explanation for how political polarization relates to the electoral influence of federal spending. He argues that the voters see the pork barrel as part of the larger issue of government spending, determined by partisanship and ideology. It is only when the political world becomes more divided over everything else that they pay attention to pork, linking it to their general preferences over government spending. Using data on pork barrel spending from 1986 through 2012 and public works spending since 1876 along with analyses of district-level election outcomes, Sidman demonstrates the rising power of polarization in United States elections. During periods of low polarization, pork barrel spending has little impact, but when polarization is high, it affects primary competition, campaign spending, and vote share in general elections.Sidman is associate professor of political science at the City University of New York, John Jay College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Bryan Jones, Sean Theriault, and Michelle Whyman are out with a big book on with a provocative thesis. In The Great Broadening: How the Vast Expansion of the Policymaking Agenda Transformed American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019), the authors argue that there are dimensions to the broadening of the US federal government into new areas of public life largely overlooked by previous scholars. Rather than public opinion or changes in the party system, they claim that it is the social movement system that is an underappreciated driver of the broadening of government in the 1960s. They continue that polarization and the growth of interest groups are each a consequence of this transformation of government, not a primary cause.The Great Broadening is rooted in a massive exploration of data connected with the Policy Agendas Projects. Culling data across nearly a century of American politics and government, the book raises as many new questions as it conclusively answers. The authors are candid that they are expanding the conversation about American political development, not necessarily refuting previous claims. They do so with a heap of quantitative measures on agenda setting in congress, federal expenditures, and the size of the administrative state. This is a must read for students of American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Cities are extremely complex institutions to understand and are continually changing. A central place to make sense of the complexities of a city is the food that is grown and sold in these areas.  Mark Winne, author of Food Town USA: Seven Unlikely Cities that are Changing the Way We Eat (Island Press, 2019) and my guest for this episode, observed the way community and place is constructed in seven different cities across the United States. Winne shares there is a synergistic interaction between food and community. Food is embedded in community and history. In our interview, Winne discusses how this study was shaped from major past events in the communities where these interviews took place. There were some difficult situations Winne gained entrance to and it was only his connections that gained him access to some of this information and some of the areas.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University and a Master of Public Administration from Iowa State University. He is currently working on a study focused on how humans are effected by embodiment of historical characters during festivals that celebrate community heritage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy