New Books in Public Policy

Alice Echols is a professor of history and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. In her book Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse and a Hidden History of American Banking (New Press, 2017) Echols offers a narrative and social history of American capitalism in the years of and preceding the Great Depression by focusing not on Wall Street but on Main Street and the men who ran hundreds of small-town building and loan associations across the nation. Situated in Colorado Springs she reconstructs the life of her shrewd and ambitious grandfather Walter Davis, who emerged from virtually nowhere to become a small town finance man running the City Savings Building and Loan Association. He gained and betrayed the trust of hundreds of depositors who invested their life savings to secure the American dream of homeownership and financial security. They found their lives destroyed by an unregulated industry and Davis’s dishonest practices. Shortfall is both the story of American capitalism told from the bottom up and of Echols uncovering her own family secrets of ill-gotten gain, decadence, scandal, loss, and ultimate despair that reflected the lives of millions across the nation. Shortfall offers lessons in the dangers associated with small-town finance men, land speculators, depositors in denial, ill-equipped investigators, inexperienced judges and an unregulated financial marketplace. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology is forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (Stanford University Press, 2017) dispels the myth that transparency of information will result in a perfect government. Dr. Mark Fenster discusses the motivations of transparency movements and justifications for state secrecy. Through the lens of communications theory, Fenster raises questions about the utility of disclosed information and how it may or may not be deemed valuable by the public. Fenster also examines the state’s ability to keep secrets and what, if any, outcomes result from information disclosure. In conclusion, Fenster asserts transparency, on its own, will not fix the state, but focused efforts on good governance just might. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Technology is a form of material culture and is a human activity. The way in which humans view technology is a social construction in which people use social processes of interpretation and negotiation. The mundane rituals that humans carry out when interacting with technology are loaded with emotional overtones. The interaction with technology in most cases become habit. The dependence and isolation that result from technology use is invisible and seems natural to membership groups that use it. Chelsea Schelly, the author of Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America (Rutgers University Press, 2017) and my guest for this episode, studied technology and the way in which people of four alternative lifestyles live without such dependency on technology. In our interview, we discuss the way in which people at The Farm, Twin Oaks, Dancing Rabbits, and Earthship Biotecture lived their daily lives by sharing some technology and living without most of it. Chelsea Schelly, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Michigan Technological University in Houghton. Dr. Schelly is also the author of Crafting Collectivity: American Rainbow Gatherings and Alternative Forms of Community. She is currently developing a project to further research the economy of these four communities. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston’s work here.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

We end the year by remembering our favorite authors, books, and some of the titles. There were so many great books written this year that we had the fun of reading and talking to a few of the authors. Weve both been doing a lot of grading, so left out as many great books as we mentioned. Please do share your favorites on Twitter/Facebook with #poliscibooks2017. Here are several of the books we mentioned in this weeks podcast: * Josh Chafetz’s Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers * Catherine Zuckert’s Machiavelli’s Politics * Brittany Cooper’s Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women * Brian Harrison and Melissa Michelson’s Listen We Need to Talk * David Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe’s Neither Liberal nor Conservative * Anna Law’s The Immigration Battle in American Courts * Alex Hertel-Fernandez’s Politics at Work * David Hopkins’s Red Fighting Blue * Jamila Michener’s Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the ‘worst of the worst.’ The 1976 decision ushered in the ‘modern’ period of the US death penalty, resulting in the execution of over 1,400 inmates, with over 8,000 individuals currently sentenced to die. Each chapter of Frank Baumgartner‘s, Marty Davidson’s, Kaneesha Johnson’s, Arvind Krishnamurthy’s, and Colin Wilson’s Deadly Justice : A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty (Oxford University Press, 2017) addresses a specific factual question and provides statistical evidence about how the modern death penalty has functioned. Baumgartner is Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina. Davidson, Johnson, Krishnamurthy, and Wilson were all students at North Carolina during the research for the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Melanee Thomas and Amanda Bittner have assembled a fascinating and important exploration of the role, understanding, and perceptions of mothers and motherhood within the realm of politics. Mothers and Others: The Role of Parenthood in Politics (University of British Columbia Press, 2017) opens up many avenues for understanding and considering what we mean and what we think about when the concept and reality of motherhood is introduced into political dynamics. This relationship, which is often a tension, as explored in the book, includes those who have run for and occupied elected office, have been appointed to public office, or have otherwise held public office. The book moves beyond this arena to consider, as well, how motherhood is communicated and why it is communicated in the ways that it is or where it is perhaps subsumed—and thus not communicated—by those running for office. Much of the discussion within Mothers and Others is also the contrast between how motherhood is seen for female public officials and how it is perceived in relation to male public officials. Many readers will be familiar with the different approach that the media has towards female candidates, especially around the issues of balancing home life and public life, but this collection of essays delves deeply into not only this overt example, but how and why this has come to frame our consumption of candidates for office. The final section of the book examines the perspective from citizens themselves—with research exploring how and when individuals who are mothers or fathers become involved in politics and how this shifts and changes over time. This section also helps the reader to think about what we, ourselves, understand about our own political knowledge and that of our fellow citizens, and how and where we may utilize that knowledge in many of the decisions we make, from voting and civic engagement to economic consumption. Thomas and Bittner both start and conclude the book by highlighting the need for more research and analysis, especially in regard to our understanding of the public workplace and how and where women and mothers have been incorporated into that space, but also how they remain outsiders in that space. This book will be of interest to many readers across a host of disciplines, as it is a complex comparative study—incorporating data and analysis from a host of different political systems, countries, cultures, and perspectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Kevan Harris is the author of A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran (University of California Press, 2017). Harris is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Much scholarship has focused on understanding the Iranian revolution of 1979, especially in relation to other nations in the Middle East and those further away in the West. The Islamic Republic of Iran is an interesting foreign policy study, but of less interest for studies of the political development of the state. Absent from this conventional interest is the ways that the Iranian government has adopted and implemented social policy, before and after the revolution. Based on extensive fieldwork, Harris shows how the government since 1979 took welfare state institutions of the pre-revolutionary regime and expanded programs for health, education, and aid. His descriptions of the provision and administration of healthcare services in rural regions of Iran is especially interesting. These findings place Iranian development into conversation with studies in sociology, political science, and area studies of the varying paths of state development in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Volatility. Instability. Insecurity. Precarity. There’s a burgeoning lexicon seeking to capture the grim economic state of more and more Americans. Join us as Jonathan Morduch describes what he and Rachel Schneider discovered when they got 253 households to track their every bit of income and their every expense over the course of a year. The results—showcased in The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton University Press, 2017)—are sobering, and should cause us to reevaluate what we think we know about poverty and inequality in postindustrial America. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

“Marriage is the foundation of a successful society,” proclaimed the Clinton-era welfare reform bill. Since then, national and state governments have spent nearly a billion dollars on programs designed to encourage poor and low-income Americans to get married and to remain married. But do any of these initiatives achieve their stated goals? To find out, listen to our interview with Jennifer Randles, author of Proposing Prosperity?: Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America (Columbia University Press, 2016), who knows first-hand what happens in such programs, bringing important new insight into evaluating claims that there is a “success sequence” that will bring people out of poverty. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The recent spate of revelations about high-profile sexual predators who have been harassing and assaulting women, sometimes for decades, along with the #MeToo campaign, have drawn renewed attention to the pernicious problem of discrimination in the workplace. We speak about these issues with Suja Thomas, whose new book, with co-author Sandra Sperino, shows us how (male) judges have invented an entire body of jurisprudence to justify dismissing sexual harassment cases before they can even get to juries. Join us for this timely and provocative discussion about Unequal: How American Courts Undermine Discrimination Law (Oxford University Press, 2017). Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy